Mark Reviews Movies: HERSELF

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 29, 2020

She knows this is it. This is the moment it ends. Sandra (Clare Dunne) is at home with her two daughters when her husband returns, and before he can enter the kitchen where the three are listening to music and dancing, Sandra sends the daughters outside. One is to hide, and the other is to run into town with a metal box.

Sandra has been saving money. The husband has found it and assumes, rightly, that the cash is a fund to finally leave him. He proves why, hitting her to the ground and stomping on her outstretched hand. Molly (Molly McCann), the younger daughter, sees all of this from the safety of her plastic playhouse, and Emma (Ruby Rose O'Hara), the elder daughter, succeeds in her mission. The box has a note, telling the first adult she finds a local store to call the police.

This is how Herself begins, with a scene of domestic terror that will continue to haunt these characters for some time. The memory of if comes to Sandra when she least expects it, as she tries to put her life together under circumstances filled with uncertainty.

It comes to Molly, too, because her father still has visitation rights on some weekends and she can't look at him without remembering what he did to her mother. Emma didn't see the abuse, so when she looks at Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson), the only person she sees is her dad. The girl doesn't understand her mother or her sister's hesitation and fear, and unknowingly to young and blameless Emma, that doesn't help.

Director Phyllida Lloyd's film isn't entirely about trauma, but it's there, defining so many moments of a story that is, otherwise, surprisingly uplifting. The situation doesn't seem like one that could be categorized in that way. The abuse is just the start of Sandra's situation.

From there, she and the girls ends up living in a hotel room, which they have to access by way of a side entrance—lest their appearance offend or otherwise dampen the mood of the hotel's regular clientele. The now family of three could be living in a house, if the system in Dublin weren't such a mess. At one point, Sandra waits in a long line with other people in a similar situation, but before any of them has a chance to even look inside the abode, a well-to-do couple has already made a deal to buy it. She and her kids are going to be stuck in that room for a while, and while social services is willing to arrange and pay for it, what kind of progress can Sandra make under these circumstances?

The story, obviously, is a bit political, taking these issues and transforming them into a specific story. While browsing the internet for a house, Sandra happens upon a man who has come up with an alternative. A person can build his or her own home at a relatively inexpensive cost, as long as they have the land, the time, the materials, and at least some help from people who know what they're doing or are willing to put in some manual labor.

Despite working two jobs, Sandra can find the time. She can buy the materials at any hardware store. The land comes to her by chance, when Peggy (Harriet Walter), a widowed doctor with a broken hip whose house Sandra cleans for one of her jobs, discovers her situation. There's a big backyard on the doctor's property that no one uses anymore. Out of the unexpected goodness of Peggy's heart and the doctor's fondness for Sandra's recently deceased mother (who cleaned the house before her), Peggy gifts Sandra the land.

All of this, of course, is a lot of coincidence and convenience, which makes the screenplay, written by Malcolm Campbell and Dunne, feel a bit more like a down-to-earth fairy tale than the realistic depiction of a physically abused, emotionally traumatized, and financially struggling woman that the early scenes suggest. Indeed, if one were to take this story at face value, it might be seen as a bit cynical. From that perspective, the argument would be that all it takes for anyone suffering from such uncertainty to get out of that situation is a little gumption and some hard work. Most people who find themselves in such insecurity aren't afforded a gift of a sizeable piece of land, obviously.

As a naïvely optimistic story, though, the film works and quite well. That's partly because it is hopeful about the basic goodness of ordinary people, partly because it acknowledges the constant and draining strain of trauma and a system that's willing to give the obviously terrible Gary a fair shake, and partly because Dunne plays this role with such naturalism and with a formidable sense of Sandra's evolution toward independence.

The goodness comes as more and more people—whom Sandra knows from work and her daughters' school or doesn't know at all, beyond a chance meeting at a hardware store—join in the build. The acknowledgement of trauma comes often, as Sandra has flashes to Gary's attack and slowly realizes why her younger daughter doesn't want to see her father anymore, and the critique of the system comes in some courtroom scenes, as Gary tries to argue that Sandra is the villain here. He almost has the judge convinced.

The effect of Dunne's performance in Herself, though, can't be underestimated. She plays Sandra with such depth and conviction that this tale feels more real than it actually is.

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