On a busy Belfast shopping street, in broad daylight, filmmaker Myrid Carten observes a woman slumped on a sidewalk bench, her head hidden in a gray hoody, her right hand clasping a bottle of red wine. Pedestrians walk past, either ignoring the hunched figure or casting her a fleeting glance of concern before carrying on with their day. Carten keeps her camera on her, in transfixed recognition — for the woman is her mother Nuala, identifiable to her daughter only by the high-heeled boots on her unsteady feet. No approach is made, no greeting shouted, no gaze returned. Later, Carten admits to feeling guilt at filming her mother as though she were a stranger, before walking away. But as her raw, searing documentary “A Want in Her” eventually makes clear, theirs is a relationship defined by safe and unsafe distances. Absence, if it doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, sometimes keeps it intact.
A substantial debut feature that expands upon profoundly personal material already probed in Carten’s short-form work, “A Want in Her” makes clear the filmmaker’s fine-art background, as it reckons with the process and payoff of sharing fragile domestic trauma with an audience of strangers. But eventually the film cedes space to first-hand anger, shame and remorse on all sides in a family blighted by alcoholism and mental illness, and offers a complex consideration of who, if anyone, is responsible for saving a life in freefall. Emotionally taxing but relieved by passages of cathartic beauty, grace and even humor, this IDFA competition entry deserves delicate handling from discerning specialist distributors, though a lengthy festival run beckons first.
The timeline here is frayed and agitated, meandering from past to present via Carten’s own remarkably perceptive adolescent experiments with a camcorder. The later chronology, meanwhile, is sometimes blurred by the wearying cyclical repetition of addiction itself. When Carten, in the present day, picks up a call from the police — who inform her that Nuala has gone missing, having last been seen in a bar — it’s clear this is a narrative already familiar to her. Indeed, much of the film plays out in helpless voicemails and heavy-hearted phone conversations that have been had before: Nuala’s alcoholism stunts not just her life, but those of family members running out of ways to help.
“It’s in the genes, it’s an allergy,” explains Carten’s drawn, hollow-eyed uncle Danny — himself a veteran of various psychiatric hospitals — as to why their family is so disproportionately marked by sorrow and personal ruin. He shelters in a decayed mobile home buried in the garden of the family home, inherited solely by his brother Kevin when their mother died twenty years before. Whether the inheritance is a blessing or a curse is open to question, though the imbalance has further rotted relations in a family tree already damaged at the root. Kevin is unmarried and comparatively straight and narrow, but embittered by the weight of obligation to Danny and Nuala; he’s a reluctant, sometimes flatly uncooperative ally to Carten when she arrives in the faint hope of rehabilitating her mother for good.
With a hellraiser’s aura having built up around her, it’s a shock to finally meet the retrieved Nuala, meekly withdrawn and scarcely coherent in a parked car, cryptically muttering that “it’s all under sands.” Eventually even the camera finds it hard to look her in the eye, averting its gaze down to her unduly cheerful yellow raincoat, as mother and daughter attempt to negotiate yet another path forward. The shock is redoubled by archival footage of a young Nuala, bright and purposeful, being interviewed as a social worker on a local news broadcast. As the manager of a women’s center in Donegal, she sought to protect victims of abuse and addiction not unlike her future self; the irony is too pointed and painful for “A Want in Her” to linger on it.
Not that the past was a far happier place, as haunting, inadvertently prescient home videos by the young Carten show her and her friends parodying the drinking and dysfunctional behavior of their elders. Another astonishing time capsule captures a bruisingly ugly argument between the teenage Carten and her mother, traveling from the living room to the front yard, as brutal verbal attacks give way to physical blows.
Whether due to denial or the fog of addiction, Nuala remembers motherhood more happily, even under the shadow of young widowhood. Her daughter isn’t quite willing to let such delusions stand. The two repeatedly and sincerely declare the unconditional terms of their love for each other: “There’s nothing you could do that would make me turn my back on you,” Nuala says insistently, knowing that she’s done rather more to risk rejection. But with that comes occasionally confrontational honesty. In one devastating scene, Carten bluntly tells her mother that she doesn’t accept mental illness as an excuse for maternal negligence.
Candid and unvarnished as such material is, “A Want in Her” isn’t wholly an exercise in vérité, as Carten seeks surreal details and distortions in ordinary domestic spaces that have been tainted by trauma. In one shot, the camera tracks balefully down a set of dirty net curtains hiding the anguish from the outside; pockets of cobwebbed mould and plaster damp are examined in extreme, alienating detail, symptoms of a household defined by neglect.
Elsewhere, she and her mother collaborate on video-art projects, restaging scenes of Nuala’s rogue wanderings in a joint effort to understand where she’s been, to experience her abandonment together. As echoed by an unusually stark, unsentimental interpretation of the Irish folk ballad “The Wild Rover” in its closing scenes — giving no certainty to the refrain “I never will play the wild rover no more” — “A Want in Her” offers no pat arc of redemption or salvation or home being where the heart is. That mother and daughter are forever bound to each other is both their comfort and their shared, terrible burden.