An artfully scrambled portrait of a deeply dysfunctional family, A Want in Her is a highly personal story of addiction and friction, shame and blame, ferocious love and crushing guilt from the Irish-born, London-based visual artist Myrid Carten. Making her feature debut, Carten initially planned to focus on the lingering feuds over inheritance between her uncles and aunts in Ireland, but her mother Nula’s long-term struggles with alcohol and mental illness soon became the more immediately dramatic narrative. Framed in an unusually arty package for such emotionally raw material, this intimate study of the damage caused by addiction and depression is a harrowing watch in places, but also an original, moving and bleakly beautiful piece of work. Following its well-received world premiere in the international competition line-up at IDFA this week, it seems assured a wider festival run and beyond.
Mostly shot by Carten from a first-person hand-held viewpoint, the loose central thread in A Want in Her is the director’s relationship with her mother Nula, a volatile love-hate bond which both interrogate on screen with sometimes painful honesty, their conversations switching between English and Irish language. Summoned back to her native corner of rural Ireland on an urgent mercy mission after Nula goes missing, Carten has to navigate not just police, doctors and social workers, but also the simmering long-term tensions between her uncles Kevin and Danny, who have barely spoken for 20 years. The highly strung Kevin now lives in the old family home, which is in ramshackle condition, while the sickly and resentful Danny sleeps in a shockingly squalid wooden cabin on the grounds. Since they refuse to communicate directly, Carten has to play go-between between the two. This is not a happy family.
Using a purposely jumbled mosaic of archive home video, contemporary footage, recorded phone calls and self-consciously staged scenes, Carten slowly fills in the tortuous back story to Nula’s ongoing issues with addiction and mental health, rehab and relapse. These appear to stem from her own mother’s sudden death, and the bitter wrangling over who should inherit the house she left behind, compounded by unbearable grief when several of Nula’s siblings died within a short space of time. A Want in Her captures just one of their funerals, but death seems to hover over this entire story, just out of shot.
Carten has clearly been an aspiring film director from childhood, peppering A Want in Her with family video snippets from her pre-teen years, some staged and charmingly amateurish, others more random clips of domestic reportage. These scratchy lo-fi flashbacks serve as a rich resource for this story, showing us not just the roots of Carten’s life as an artist and film-maker but also heartbreaking proof of her mother’s former life as a glamorous, confident, intelligent, mentally stable social worker. They reinforce the sense of a formerly happy family now in tragic freefall.
Judged by the conventions of documentary journalism, A Want in Her falls short. It appears that most of the footage was shot between 2018 and 2020, but Carten’s impressionistic collage approach means that dates, locations and sequencing remain opaque throughout the film, confusingly so at times. According to her IDFA press notes, the director initially considered adding an explanatory voice-over, but ultimately to let the audio clips from pre-recorded phone calls with family, police and health workers tell the story instead. This bold stylistic decision works in terms of immediate context but lacks deeper historical background. A little more family hinterland would have enriched this story’s emotional impact.
But as an example of how to make a strikingly original aesthetic statement from wrenchingly personal material, A Want in Her is consistently compelling and impressive. Carten creates a compelling effect by jump-cutting between observational reportage, semi-abstract visual details, majestic footage of the rugged Irish landscape, and more stylised framing devices, including some of her video artworks, many of which feature Nula playing a version of her real self. One performance-based snippet even features the director miming along to her mother’s words, which is both unsettling and moving.
Music and sound are also strong stylistic elements. Clarice Jensen’s austere cello-based score leans into Carten’s more experimental aesthetic, while tracks by contemporary Irish avant-folk group Lankum and modish Dublin alt-rockers Fontaines DC help bring a welcome sense of emotional crescendo to the film’s finale, even though this dysfunctional family psychodrama is still a long way from closure by the time the end credits roll.
Director: Myrid Carten
Cinematography: Myrid Carten, Donna Wade, Seán Mullan
Editing: Karen Harley
Music: Clarice Jensen
Sound design: Morgan Muse
Producers: Tadhg O’Sullivan, Roisín Geraghty
Production company: Inland Films (Ireland)
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In English, Irish
81 minutes
