Herself review – Irish domestic abuse drama suffers from tonal whiplash

Phyllida Lloyd is best known as the director behind Mamma Mia!, one of those rare films that has managed to find a permanent place in the British collective consciousness. With Herself, Lloyd takes on a far more grounded, gritty story than her world-conquering musical, crafting a drama about domestic abuse and the shortcomings of the Irish welfare state. Yet within that harsh environment, Lloyd tries to retain some of the sing-song joy of Mamma Mia!, a bold choice that rarely pays off, making an absolute mess of the atmosphere and tone.

At the heart of Herself is single mother Sandra (Clare Dunne, who also serves as the film’s writer), attempting to break free of the grip of her abusive ex-husband Gary by building a house for her and her two daughters, leasing the land from her employer Peggy (Harriet Walter). Sandra has to keep the project a secret, both to keep it safe from Gary and to make sure she can stay on the council housing list should anything go wrong.

In its best moments, Herself is a powerful indictment of the systems – from unfeeling custody courts to stingy financial aid – that force women to stay with abusive partners, cutting them off from any reasonable means of escape. But this hard work is undone whenever Lloyd shows us the process of the house being built, which is always done through musical montage. The sheer volume of these montages would make even a Rocky movie blush, and they create a jarring tonal whiplash whenever they pop up, especially when they follow the deeply upsetting and rather graphic flashbacks to Sandra’s beatings at Gary’s hands.

Dunne gives a forceful lead performance, but the supporting cast are basically cyphers, suffering from the same tonal discrepancies at the rest of the movie. Some characters feel like they belong in a different film to the others, so Herself’s world never feels all that lived-in, despite its commitment to realism whenever Sandra has to deal with the malign forces of the state and Gary’s family.

With its two halves working against one another rather than in tandem, Herself winds up as less than the sum of its parts, both its lightest and darkest moments feeling unearned. The relationship between institutional deficiencies and domestic violence is an under-explored one on screen, and Herself should be commended for bringing it to light in a relatively crowd-pleasing way, but its good intentions are stymied by its deeply confused execution.

Herself was screened as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2020. It is released in UK cinemas on 10 September.