Mark Reviews Movies: A GOOD WOMAN IS HARD TO FIND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 7, 2020

We first see Sarah (Sarah Bolger) covered in blood. It's a flash-forward to a scene later in A Good Woman Is Hard to Find—a narrative device that has become so overused and is so often implemented with no good reason that it usually means nothing. Here, though, director Abner Pastoll and Ronan Blaney use it correctly.

It's preparing us for the idea of what's to come. This young woman, who looks defeated and overwhelmed (even aside from the blood on her face), is going to face violence. It only prepares us for the idea, though. What the filmmakers have in store for the character and us is something for which we can't be prepared.

This is a tightly wound thriller that just keeps unspooling hurdle after hurdle, challenge after challenge, and horror after horror, until we start thinking the filmmakers can't keep up, the main character won't be able to handle it, and we're just going to be let down by the inevitable moment when the story's construction falls apart. That moment, though, never arrives, because Blaney's screenplay is so clever in the way it establishes certain plot beats to be resolved, only to distract us with the escalation of another one.

Everything that's revealed here is, in retrospect, completely predictable, but the ways in which Blaney's script and Pastoll's execution get us there aren't. The latter is what matters.

Sarah is a widow and a mother to two children. As we suspect early and learn for certain later, her husband was murdered at a park near the family's housing estate. The police have written off the killing as just another of the many drug-related ones in the neighborhood, assuming that Sarah's deceased spouse was just another dealer.

Right away, Blaney sets up a lot about Sarah, the helplessness and hopelessness of her situation, and her capacity to endure and work around whatever problems might come her way. There's the reality of the murder, as well as the facts that her son Ben (Rudy Doherty) witnessed his father's death, leaving him mute, and that the people who are supposed to help Sarah aren't going to do so. Her mother Alice (Jane Brennan) still resents Sarah for abandoning a comfortable, middle-class life to marry a guy from a housing estate—both the man and the place having bad reputations.

Sarah is wholly on her own. A comedic sequence in which she tries to find some batteries for her vibrator shows that she's resilient and crafty in getting what she needs—some relief and satisfaction.

Is it revealing too much to point out that Blaney is crafty in his own way, setting up that sex toy for a far less amusing, far more serious moment later? That is to say we've got a case of the principle of Chekhov's vibrator. It's difficult to tell how much is too much to give away here. The narrative is tight enough that everything falls into place as it must, but its details are unexpectedly off-kilter enough that we're never quite sure what is going to fall into place when or how.

Anyway, Sarah receives a visitor one night in the personage of Tito (Andrew Simpson), a low-rent drug dealer who has just stolen a stash from the neighborhood's most prominent gang. Tito is the first of a few unknown entities in this story. He's equal parts incompetent and cunning, vulnerable and intimidating, and friendly and threatening. The guy wants to hide the drugs in Sarah's bathroom, and he'll give her a cut of the profits. On the other hand, Tito insists he'll hurt Sarah and her children if she doesn't go along with his plan.

Meanwhile, the head of the gang is looking for Tito. He's Leo Miller (Edward Hogg), another odd duck, who's a prim and proper crime lord of the violent, sociopathic variety. Leo's the sort of guy who'll torture two men with a hammer, but he poses his questions calmly when it comes to the topic of his stolen drugs. He only gets really mad when one of his victims makes a grammatical error or mistakes a simile for a metaphor.

This, perhaps, is far enough to go in terms of a straightforward plot synopsis, if only because, while the overview of the following events isn't surprising, the particulars do become pretty shocking. Sarah feels helpless in the face of Tito and a system that's apathetic to her troubles. She has to protect her children, and we discover how far she's willing to go in order to do so. There's plenty of suspense, such as when there's something behind a door with the cops investigating the house, and there's plenty of discomfort, when someone has to get rid of that something without leaving a trace.

The story is almost exclusively presented from Sarah's perspective, and we understand and/or sympathize with every choice she makes and every action she takes—as unthinkable as some of those choices and actions may be. Part of that comes from the filmmakers' dedication to presenting the character's situation with a specific sense of despair, as well as how each new problem logically builds from the previous ones.

Most of it, though, is due to Bolger's performance, which runs the emotional gamut (The scene in which the character has to dispose of a certain piece of evidence is all the more horrifying because of Bolger's shifting reaction to it). Bolger is especially impressive in how she juxtaposes strength and vulnerability, never allowing us to see Sarah as weak in any definition of the word. The character and the performance serve as the anchor of A Good Woman Is Hard to Find, and as grisly and morally ambiguous as the story may become, Sarah and Bolger remain unwavering.

Note: A Good Woman Is Hard to Find is available to watch online through Film Movement's Virtual Cinema. You can choose to support a local independent theater (e.g., Facets in Chicago) with your rental purchase. Half of proceeds from the rental will go to the theater. For more information and to access the film, click here.

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