A Want in Her review – daughter’s searing portrait of family...

For anyone who has been close to an alcoholic, or someone with mental-health issues or, as is the case here, both at once, this is a hard watch. Film-maker Myrid Carten, who holds the camera much of the time as well as directing, exposes here the open wound that is her relationship with her mother Nuala, who has both bipolar disorder and alcoholism. Nuala often goes missing on binges, and as the film opens we hear Myrid telling someone on the phone how she just spotted her mother on a Belfast street in a total state, but recognisable because of the glamorous high-heeled shoes she was wearing.

You’d struggle to realise this is the same woman we see in news footage from years earlier: soignée, composed and described as a social worker who has written a guidance paper for police on how to handle victims of domestic abuse. The Nuala of the present, when sober, is still articulate, empathic and insightful at times – it’s just that she can’t stop herself from hitting the red wine hard, an addiction that similarly affects one of her brothers; another brother, who insists he’s sober, has an unspecified mental disorder that leaves him prone to rages. Families, eh?

Nuala gave Myrid a camcorder when she was a teenager and, a natural archivist as well as instinctive film-maker, she seems to have kept everything. That includes footage of kids in her class, about nine or 10 years old at the time, acting out little dramas of drunken adults rowing with their spouses. Later we see footage of teenage Myrid and another girl (her sister?) acting out a psychodrama cribbed from the antics of Nuala and other family members. It all escalates until we get an extraordinary spell where Nuala effectively plays herself for the camera, lying like a corpse in a road at night, resplendent and ridiculous in her rabbit-fur jacket. Later, Myrid lip-syncs to recordings of Nuala talking, a device reminiscent of Clio Barnard’s The Arbor which, like this, offers a searing examination on generational abuse and guilt.

If A Want in Her has a flaw it could do with a bit more in the way of narrative progression, a teleological shape that drives the story forward. That said, at least it offers some sense of closure, sealed with a powerful montage set to a propulsive folk performance.

• A Want in Her is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10 October.