‘A Want In Her’: IDFA Review

Dir: Myrid Carten. Ireland/UK/Netherlands. 2024. 81mins

Turning difficult families into creative material is always a risky exercise. Visual artist Myrid Carten accepts, weighs and generates tension from this risk in every frame of her powerful debut feature, which centres on the challenges of having a mentally unstable, alcoholic mother who demands mothering herself. This raw, emotionally devastating documentary is made watchable because it catches the beauty, love and even humour that so often make a fragile nest in the midst of misery. If it has a message other than that, it’s about having to do your best, with sympathy and honesty, shouldering the pain and the guilt and the anger, when none of the routes forward are good ones.

The work of an artist making her own rules about how to tell this story

First and foremost, however, this is a story about mothers and daughters and family, about going back to the place where you grew up and confronting ghosts which turn out to be as much in the present as in the past. It’s this that will take Carten’s debut out of the art world spaces where her work has previously been shown. A Want in Her is a tough watch, but also a cathartic one. After its premiere in IDFA competition, the film will likely embark on a multi-festival tour, but indie distributors should take a look too.

The fact that the director has already mined her past and her family for her gallery work is one that emerges only gradually from a documentary that does not announce itself as an artist’s film. Yet it is also, emphatically, the work of an artist, one who is making her own rules about how to tell this story, far from documentary dogmas. When, for example, the camera emerges face-down from an open hot water cistern and wanders into a child’s bedroom that looks like nobody has touched it since some earthquake struck, our view is distorted by the water that drips from the lens like tears.

Phone messages from the police establish the film’s point of departure: Nuala Carten, the director’s mother, last seen in a bar in Belfast, has been missing for days. Her daughter returns to the family house, camera in hand, to be close to the search. Shabby and neglected, it has clearly seen better days. To heat it, you go outside and scrape what’s left of the coal into a bucket: the sound of the shovel on the hard ground slices through the cold air. There’s little clue as to exactly where we are – though the Gaelic language and a brief reference to Tory Island places this not quite suburban, not quite rural property somewhere in Ireland’s Donegal Gaeltacht. 

A couple of Myrid Carten’s uncles feature; one inhabits the house, while the other is temporarily holed up in a decrepit mobile home in the overgrown garden. The house dweller, Paul, is a garrulous softie with a literary bent, but he’s not above smashing all the windows of the mobile home while brother Danny is in police custody to prevent him returning. Danny comes back anyway. A wild rover – to quote an Irish ballad that is heard here in a melancholy rendition that strips all the blarney romance away from the term – Danny seems used to sleeping under a duvet covered in broken glass.

Fifteen minutes in, Nuala appears, drunk, in a car. She is both here and not here, and you can feel the emotional devastation of her daughter, seated next to her and behind the camera. Later, we will learn that Nuala has been sectioned three times, and that for a while she thought she was IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. (“He seems to be a bit funnier than Jesus”, she says in a film-within-the-film that we watch her daughter watching – presumably one of Myrid’s own short video works.)

The tension in Nuala, between sharp intelligence and willful self-destruction is one of the things that makes A Want in Her such compelling viewing. As she tells her daughter in one of her more lucid moments, “half of you knows your brain is breaking down, the other half is away with it”. Explanations may lurk in the fragments of the home movies that the director has been making since she was a pre-teen, but none are pushed or even articulated. There, briefly, is the director’s grandmother, whose death seems to have triggered Nuala’s breakdown; there are Myrid’s friends larking about role-playing domestic dramas that turn dark and seem to hint at violence seen or suffered. (We know from a Gaelic TV channel news report that Nuala used to be a social worker who specialized in domestic abuse cases).

With a striking soundtrack by US composer and cellist Clarice Jensen that builds through feedback loops into great ominous walls of sound, and a repeated visual insert of a range of bare hills rising from peat bogs that somehow ground this family drama in Ireland’s archaic, mythical past, A Want in Her is reminiscent, at times, of the work of Jonathan Glazer. But it’s too original and accomplished for such parallels to stick. And it ends with an emotional punch that will send audiences reeling.