A Want in Her: A raw and surprisingly funny examination of unconditional love
Doc Weekly was in attendance at the 2024 edition of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) to catch screenings of some of the year’s best documentaries, but also to see World Premieres in the competition sections of the most exciting films to expect in 2025. Stay tuned for more coming soon !
Irish people deal with grief using catholicism, humour and alcohol. I can say that, because I’m Irish. But artist Myrid Carten says it so much more beautifully than me.
Carten’s film, A Want in Her, is a raw, gut-punching and surprisingly funny examination of the meaning of unconditional love. She follows her own mother Nuala, an alcoholic, drifting between rehab clinics, psychiatric hospitals, her family home and sometimes, the street. The film teeters between care and rage, as Carten flies home from London to look for her mother when she goes missing, then realises her own powerlessness in the face of her mother’s addiction.
Nuala was once a successful social worker but suffered a mental breakdown after her own mother died suddenly. It was the string that pulled the fabric loose, as Nuala and her siblings struggled without a matriarch to guide them. Her brother holes up in an abandoned caravan beside the family home with a heroin addiction, but still manages to give Carten some career advice when she peers in to say hello. While the film is a study of a dysfunctional family, these small, humorous interactions between the characters provide some much needed relief. At one point, I was laughing and crying at the same time.
Stylistically, the film embraces a “playful blend” of fictional and documentary elements, incorporating home videos from Carten’s childhood and recordings of video installations from her current work as an artist. They provide an emotional context for Carten, allowing her to hint at what it must have been like growing up and what it is like as an adult to care for a mad, alcoholic mother. And it is these very personal moments that somehow speak to universal truths about love, care and familial rage.
In a press release, Carten noted, “The extraordinary thing about people is how they deal with their own hauntedness, more than their skills or their talents, and it’s only when I look at my darkness that I can accept other people’s darknesses. I’m not the most public person, but my work is deeply personal and exposing. I suppose I trust people enough that this specific and quite extreme story can also be universal.”
The film is dotted with Irish republican symbolism that only other eagle-eyed Irish history nerds might notice: a framed printout of the Irish proclamation, Nuala’s reference to Bobby Sands (the leader of the 1981 IRA hunger strike) as her hero and Carten’s use of the Irish language to speak to her mother, when English words won’t come to her. While no direct mention of The Troubles is made, the film undoubtedly speaks to a generation in Northern Ireland who experienced intense violence, fear and disorder in their youth.
Carten leaves you to ponder these implications while driving through the barren, weathered landscapes of the north of Ireland to the pulsing celtic drone of music by Lankum and Fontaines DC.
It is not a story that one forgets easily. The film passes no judgment on its characters, nor on Carten herself, but rather forces the audience to sit in her shoes for 81 minutes. Like her daughter, we search in Nuala’s defiant and striking face for answers, leaving the film with the pulsing knots of love, grief and fear we all hold in ourselves exposed and catharised.
“A Want in Her” had its world premiere earlier this month in IDFA’s International Competition section and has been boarded by sales agent Syndicado.
