Herself: Richly poignant empowerment drama

Herself (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and vicious domestic violence

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.29.21 

There’s a strong sense, throughout this superbly mounted little Irish drama — exclusive to Amazon Prime — that star/co-scripter Clare Dunne writes from personal awareness.

 

I dearly hope that isn’t the case.

 

Sandra (Clare Dunne) and younger daughter Molly (Molly McCann) are delighted by
the progress being made under the watchful gaze of contractor Aido (Conleth Hill).

She stars as Sandra, a single mother with two young daughters, who has just escaped her possessive and abusive partner, Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson). Although “the system” has kept a roof over their heads, bouncing them from one tiny hotel room to another, she’s barely scraping by. She works two part-time jobs, to keep them fed: as a pub barmaid; and as a housekeeper for Peggy (Harriet Walter), an aging doctor for whom Sandra’s mother once worked, back in the day.

 

But these details come a bit later. Director Phyllida Lloyd, and scripters Dunne and Malcolm Campbell, open their film with a shocking sequence: Gary bloodies Sandra’s face and then stomps on her wrist, shattering it far beyond any hope of total recovery.

 

The worst part? Sandra has anticipated just such an encounter, arming elder daughter Emma (Ruby Rose O’Hara) with a previously written plea for help and a code phrase — “black widow” — that sends the little girl running to the closest store.

 

Despite this, months later, Sandra’s still forced to interact with Gary, given that he gets weekend visits with their daughters. (Seriously? After that display of violence? If this is accurate, either Sandra had a crap lawyer, or Ireland needs to seriously revise its family protective services laws.)

 

And, as always is the case with serial abusers, Gary’s doing his best to wheedle his way back into their lives. Which, to Sandra’s credit, she rejects utterly. She most emphatically is not a serial victim.

 

But she is increasingly desperate, because the status quo isn’t sustainable; lacking a permanent home isn’t psychologically healthy for her daughters. Worse yet, this situation actually lends weight to Gary’s contrasting “stability,” since he’s living with his parents. But Sandra seems without options; rents are beyond her financial ability, never mind mortgages and property prices.

 

One day, a passing reference in one of her daughters’ bedtime stories proves inspirational: Could she build her own home? (Dunne was inspired, as she explains in the film’s production notes, by Irish architect Dominic Stevens, who with friends constructed a wooden self-build in 2012, for roughly $33,000.)

 

Seductive as this notion is, money remains an issue. During an exchange with a bureaucratic clerk that brilliantly illustrates the ludicrous flaws of the welfare system, Sandra accurately argues that a one-time loan would be far cheaper to the system, than the ongoing costs associated with hotel expenses … and gets nowhere. It’s a shrewdly scripted shake-your-head exchange.