‘Vicky’: Dublin Review

Dir: Sasha King. Ireland. 2022. 89 mins

The personal and the political are inextricably linked in Vicky, a powerful documentary saluting the achievements of Irish cervical cancer campaigner Vicky Phelan. Her fight to expose medical negligence and stay alive for her family is a heartbreaking human interest story made all the more compelling by the wider issues it reveals in Ireland’s attitudes to women and women’s bodies. An ideal fit for television services both mainstream and specialist, it could merit a committed theatrical release especially in a domestic market where Phelan is well known and much admired. 

Brings out the shocking ways in which successive medical scandals in Ireland have almost routinely been about issues that affect women, women’s bodies and reproduction.

Director Sasha King recognises that the film’s biggest asset is Phelan herself. A tireless fighter fuelled by anger and the love of family, she’s a charismatic presence. In the face of waves of adversity, she remains brave, honest and articulate in expressing what is happening and how she feels. Her willingness to let the cameras into her life is at the heart of the film.

It is Phelan who tells us that in 2014, during sex with her husband Jim, she started to bleed, something that had never happened before. She sought medical advice and bled again when a smear was taken. She was subsequently diagnosed with cervical cancer and began an aggressive regime of chemotherapy and radiation. The diagnosis was all the more shocking because a smear test in 2011 was assessed as NAD (No Abnormality Detected) and she had been recommended for routine screening thereafter.

Phelan’s cancer returned in 2017 when she was told there was no treatment available and that she may have 6-12 months left to live. “At 43, I was told to go home and get my affairs in order,” she recalls. Refusing to accept the seemingly inevitable, she fought to get access to a clinical trial and to really understand what had happened to her.

In the initial stages of the film, King underpins Phelan’s story with a subtle sense of isolation and absence. Phelan was supported by her husband and two children but this was also something she went through alone. We see empty hospital corridors as she attends treatment sessions and there are frequent, comforting visits to the beach where Phelan goes for solitary strolls and fleeting moments of tranquility.

Phelan was to discover that her 2011 smear test was a false positive and that she was not alone. Many other women had suffered the same clinical systems failures in a health service that had outsourced testing to an American company Cervical Check. The cost was a third of what it would have been if the work had been done in Ireland. It is clear that the decision to outsource testing cost lives. Vicky gradually assumes the guise of a David and Goliath legal thriller as Phelan joins forces with impressive solicitor Cian O’Carroll. 

King and her team tell the stories of other women who were similarly misdiagnosed and the moves to silence them. She gathers together all the pieces of a story involving medical malpractice, the false promises of politicians and the ruined lives that ensued. She also brings out the shocking ways in which successive medical scandals in Ireland have almost routinely been about issues that affect women, women’s bodies and reproduction. Asked to compile a report, Professor Gabriel  Scally illustrates the casual misogyny he frequently found with the story of a GP pointing out that nuns don’t get cervical cancer because they choose to live a life of chastity.

Phelan’s story is the connecting thread that brings all these elements together as she campaigns, testifies, lives to see a public apology from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in 2019 and to sign the form that will allow her daughter to have the HPV vaccine. In her speeches to others, Phelan bluntly talks of vaginas and penises and the need for Ireland to have honest discussions about universal health issues rather than watching its citizens literally dying of embarrassment. Still defying the odds at the time of writing, she is a heroic figure and King’s film does her story justice.