Inside Out
By Michael Sicinski
A Want in Her
Dir. Myrid Carten, Ireland, no distributor
A Want in Her played March 16 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2025.
The debut feature from Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten is undeniably personal, given that it takes the form of a diary/essay film about her family, with a specific focus on her alcoholic mother, Nuala. A Want in Her details the broad ramifications of addiction, the way it tears families apart while simultaneously inducing guilt in those family members struggling to offer the addict support. But there is a strange contradiction running throughout Carden’s film. The family dynamics she documents are very familiar, certainly to anyone who has had a loved one caught in the grip of alcohol or drugs. But there is also a highly specific aspect to the film, suggesting that this particular family is trapped within destructive, decades-long patterns of dysfunction. While most of the attention is given to Nuala’s on-again, off-again struggles with sobriety, A Want in Her provides space for the experiences of Nuala’s brothers Kevin and David. These family members are often uncomfortable with being filmed and interviewed by Carden, but they appear as though they’ve made their peace with her creative project and their place within it.
Carden seems to want to use her film to explore these aspects and perhaps find ways to heal. But the results can also be self-serving and punitive, with the filmmaker settling scores and airing long-simmering grievances with her mother. The more personal A Want in Her gets, the less it feels like a document constructed with a prospective viewer in mind, and so the result is edifying and intrusive in equal measure. In fact, A Want in Her reminded me at times of Small Talk (2016), an independent film from Taiwan in which director Huang Hui-chen trains her camera on her mother A-nu, in order to query her about the neglect Hui-chen experienced in childhood. (A-nu wasn’t an alcoholic. She was a butch lesbian for whom motherhood was the result of an ill-fated attempt at heterosexuality.) In both films, daughters look to their mothers in the hope of some form of explanation or reparative future relationship, and in both cases, the viewer often feels extraneous at best, and at worst like an emotional rubbernecker.
One of the film’s recurring motifs is the incorporation of old camcorder footage of Carden and another young girl. They are play-acting, apparently reenacting scenes of Carden’s verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Nuala. In a way this literalizes the “Inner Child” that Carden aims to heal. But the footage cuts both ways. On the one hand, it demonstrates young Myrid’s explicit understanding of her mother’s shortcomings. On the other, Carten’s illustrative use of this material suggests that her perception of her mother has not progressed or matured. Myrid and her uncle Kevin are quite clear about the ways Nuala’s drunken behavior has hurt them, but there is little fleshing out of the woman, offering a picture that might at least explain why she turned to drinking. It is possible to comprehend and to empathize without lapsing into justification, but Myrid’s frustration with her mother’s behavior and self-pity leads the film to an impasse.
At times, the film hints at a broader context, such as Nuala’s career as a social worker being emotionally taxing, or the historical attitudes toward drinking in Irish society. Carden’s deceased father is alluded to, but neither he nor Nuala’s relationship with him are explored. It’s possible that Carten is so familiar with these questions that she doesn’t recognize the viewer may not be. Ironically, the filmmaker’s intimate knowledge of her chosen subject matter occludes her ability to express it to her viewer, and the result is that her own pain stands as the one axiom that the film can insist upon. One of the film’s precipitating events is when Myrid is in Dublin and sees her heretofore missing mother drunk on a park bench. Instead of going up to her, she films her from a distance and walks on. This footage, shot without her mother’s awareness, appears several times in the film. Carden admits that she feels guilty about ignoring her mother, but she decides that this was the self-care she needed in order to break the cycle.
This comes across like an honest conclusion, and no one would blame Carden for deciding she’d had enough. But it forces us to ask whether the creation of A Want in Her is a similar prioritization of self-care, rather than an attempt to examine her personal history from a critical distance. It may seem unfair to fault Carden for her process, or to demand that it be a different kind of artwork. However, every work of art, no matter how personal, has a rhetorical dimension. It is a communicative act aimed at a prospective viewer, and this document places the spectator in a difficult position. Since we are not living this particular story, it is possible for us to look upon it with broader empathy, to see the dysfunctional structures that perpetuate this family’s pain. But we don’t really have access to that pain, only Carden’s representation of it. By trying to view the film critically, we risk seeming insensitive to the filmmaker’s lived experience; by taking it at face value, we risk insensitivity toward those Carden depicts. In either case, the viewer must grapple with A Want in Her’s emotional shapelessness, since the film feels less like retrospective understanding and more like an open wound.