A Want In Her: devastating mother-daughter documentary about the cycle of addiction

About 30 minutes into Myrid Carten’s devastating debut documentary, her mother Nuala wakes up from a nap on the couch and talks to her daughter, sitting behind the camera. Has she watched Kind Hearts and Coronets?, the mother wonders. “It’s a classic,” she says.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is a story about a man named Louis who spends his life trying to rise above a fate that in the end pulls him back. Nuala, a former social worker, is pulled back into cycles of addiction and alcoholism, swirling in and out of them throughout the film.

“It’s in the genes, it’s an allergy,” Nuala’s brother Danny says, as he struggles with homelessness and addiction, as well as repeated encounters with law enforcement. Nuala’s other brother, Kevin, lives quietly, pressed under the guilt of not being able to keep his family members from their path of self-destruction.

The filmmaker does not set out to explain how her mother and uncle got to this point – which can feel frustrating at times. Instead, sometimes employing dizzying camera angles, old home video footage and re-enactments, she tries to implement some semblance of a therapeutic routine, using her camera to get frank with her mother – at one point accusing her of using her mental health as an excuse for her addiction.

The ‘Her’ in the title is Myrid as much as her mother – the audience might take it as simply a reference to Nuala’s need for alcohol, but there is a need on Myrid’s part to establish a boundary between her and her mother. She needs reassurance that she isn’t responsible for Nuala’s choices, and that she won’t sink into the quagmire that threatens to swallow her mother.

The film does an exceptional job of provoking empathy and a shared sense of dejection, but at times leaves the viewer wishing it would trade its abstraction for a fuller picture of Nuala. In its most interesting scenes, Myriad plays Nuala; it is both the tragedy and gift of the film that Nuala never gets to play Myrid – a tragedy because we don’t get to see what the world looks like with Nuala’s eyes, a gift because we get to see the art she inspires in her daughter.

“Today, my mother is sober,” a closing title announces. After seeing Nuala’s struggles, it would have been something of a release to see her recovery too, no matter how brief. What could have been a healing remains a hidden wound.

► A Want In Her is in UK cinemas 10 October.