In her fascinating hybrid documentary feature, the Irish film-maker and visual artist Myrid Carten returns to Ireland from London to search for her missing mother and turn the camera on her own fractured family history.
What begins with the harrowing image of Carten’s mother, Nuala, unconscious on a bench in Belfast with a bottle to hand, grows into a reckoning with intergenerational trauma.
Carten has previously mined her upbringing in gallery and multimedia work, but A Want in Her fuses her art practice with film in a formally daring, emotionally provocative piece. The narrative is fragmented, emerging through footage from different eras, and amplifying the cyclical nature of addiction and relapse.
Home videos, dramatic re-enactments and phone calls telegraph a family in distress. Images of decay – water droplets distorting the lens, mould leeching on to net curtains – suggest a home that is anything but homely.
Despite the devastation, A Want in Her is underscored with affection and black humour. Nuala is presented not as a caricature of dysfunction but as a woman poised between sharp intellect, former achievements and hell-bent self-destruction.
In lucid moments she reflects on her breakdowns and absences; in other sections she disappears entirely. Her brothers – one living in a crumbling mobile home, the other a worn-out caretaker – offer insight into the fallout.
Carten’s project is not without its ethical provocations. A Want in Her invites serious reflection on the power dynamics of documentary film-making, especially when the director is also a family member.
Nuala at times objects to the camera. Questions abound: how much agency does a subject like Nuala – at times homeless, at other times incoherent or institutionalised – have in the act of being filmed? Does the camera offer her an outlet or merely a frame?
Carten, to her credit, is acutely aware of this tension. She grapples on-screen with the guilt of recording as she crafts a personal, radical chronicle of addiction, mental illness and the blurred lines between duty and survival.
In cinemas from Friday, October 10th
