IDFA 2024: A Want in Her (dir. Myrid Carten) | Review

A Want In Her opens on a busy street in Belfast, focusing on an empty bench with a voice call from the director, Myrid Carten to her Uncle Kevin, saying that she saw her mother, Nuala, who has been missing for a year, drunk and passed out. Nuala, who has been in flux throughout Myrid’s life, suffers from alcoholism, where her binge drinking led to incarceration, sectioned, and homeless. The opening of Myrid’s debut feature film launches us immediately into her family’s tragic disease, addiction and mental illness, specifically with alcohol.

Behind the camera for most of the film, Myrid, an artist in her own right, who had an exhibition in London in 2023 featuring stills and videos of her mother, continues to explore her mother’s life as an understanding and processing of her own feelings. With her foray into filmmaking, Myrid demonstrates a variety of film modes. Structuring her film between meetings with Nuala and the family home in Donegal, Ireland, she uses home videos she shot with a camcorder as a child, drone footage inside the rundown home in the present day, landscape shots on 16mm surrounding this isolated area, as well as filming her mother through interviews and staged sequences of her wandering the outskirts. Through these choices, Myrid balances out the different tones that come from the images dealing with anger, guilt, disease, and optimism.Myrid juxtaposes her upbringing to the present as an artist and relationships through filmmaking. An early sequence shows Myrid in her classroom recording her teacher and classmates, while two students reenact a playful drunken scenario as adults. Cutting back and forth, it’s apparent that as children, our subconscious transforms these traumatic events into harmless scenarios as a coping mechanism. These instances develop and Myrid, now an adult, is still processing and living with those realities. And it is through the power of Myrid’s art where her experience can express herself to herself and Nuala in the only way she knows.

The film’s main sequences are the several one-on-one intimate interview-style conversations Myrid has with Nuala where they discuss numerous topics such as her Nuala’s mother’s passing which had the most impact on her mental health, as well as the past, family, and her alcohol abuse. Through long takes capturing the complex psyche of Nuala, reminiscent of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason or Rosine Mbakam’s Delphine Prayers, she unveils her selfish and narcissistic tendencies, but also is grounded by her candidness. Frustrating and grueling, these intimate scenes put you in the position of Myrid. While her stoic responses show an acceptance of Nuala’s life, the mother-daughter relationship is shattered in lieu of a detrimental passive-aggressive one. Even though Myrid’s behind the camera, her stuttering speech and hesitation shows a regression back to childhood.

A Want in Her is a devastating, yet honest portrait of addiction, as well as the effects it has on others. It’s through Myrid’s empathetic and persistence where you realize that in order to nurture others, you need to nurture yourself. We are shown the actual footage of the opening scene later in the film, which in itself, judges Myrid’s inaction with guilt just as much as Nuala’s struggle on the bench. After accumulating footage and images over a decade, it is clear why Myrid decided to finish the film now. Myrid and Nuala show a tenderness and frustration that seeps through you, allowing this arduous process of filming, confronting, reflecting, and finishing this film to be a completely exhausting, yet cathartic experience.

A Want in Her is debuting in the International Competition of IDFA 2024.