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‘A Want in Her’ Review: A Daughter’s Shattering Testament to Her Mother’s Absence, Presence and Endurance
In her extraordinary debut feature 'A Want in Her,' Myrid Carten fixes her camera, when possible, on her erratic, alcoholic mother Nuala.
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. 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. With a hellraiser’s aura having built up around her, it’s a shock to finally meet the retrieved Nuala, meekly withdrawn and scarcely coherent in a parked car, cryptically muttering that “it’s all under sands.”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.
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