Oz in her review – A Daughter’s Searing Portrait of Family Addiction and Mental Illness | films

andOr anyone who has been close to an alcoholic, or anyone who has mental health issues, or as is the case here, both, this is a difficult hour. Filmmaker Mairead Cartin, who holds the camera much of the time as well as directs, here reveals the open wound that is her relationship with her mother Nuala, who suffers from bipolar disorder and alcoholism. Nuala is often missing at Binges, and as the film opens, we hear Myrid telling someone on the phone how she had just spotted her mother on a Belfast street in a complete state, but recognizable because of the light high-heeled shoes she was wearing.

You struggle to realize that this is the same woman we see in news footage years ago: Soignée, who composed and described a social worker who wrote a tip sheet for police on how to deal with victims of domestic abuse. In the present, Nuala, when sober, still expresses compassion, empathy, and occasional insight—she just can’t stop herself from hitting red wine hard, an addiction that similarly affects one of her brothers; Another brother, who insists he is sober, suffers from an unspecified mental disorder that leaves him vulnerable to rage. Families, eh?

Nuala gave Myrid a video camera as a teenager, and a natural archivist as well as an instinctive filmmaker, she seems to have kept it all. This includes footage of the kids in her class, around nine or 10 at the time, acting out little dramatics of drunken adults walking around with their spouses. Later, we see footage of teenage Mairead and another girl (her sister?) acting out a psychic array of antics from Nuala and other family members. Everything escalates until we get an extraordinary spell in which Nuala effectively plays herself for the camera, lying like a corpse in a road at night, watching and fucking in her bunny sweater. Later, Myrid Lip-Syncs to recordings of Nuala Talking, an instrumentation reminiscent of Clio Barnard’s The Arbor that, like this, offers a disdainful examination of abuse and guilt.

If it needed to have a flaw, it could do with a little more in the way of narrative progression, a teleological form that moves the story forward. However, it at least provides some sense of closure, closed off by a powerful montage set to a propulsive folk performance.