Rated: MA 15+
Directed by: Phyllida Lloyd
Written by: Malcolm Campbell, Clare Dunne
Produced by: Sharon Horgan, Ed Guiney, Rory Gilmartin
Starring: Clare Dunne, Harriet Walter, Conleth Hill, Ian Lloyd Anderson.
‘I miss him. I don’t mean him, I mean who he was. I want to fix it.’
This is just one of the many heartbreaking tests to her resolve that a woman must face when she flees her home and her partner to protect herself and her children.
On one level, Herself is a subtle game of cat and mouse between husband and wife (especially on
the husband’s side).
While his character operates mostly from behind the scenes, the escalation of
the husband’s machinations asks whether this is a man sinking into the depths his own desperation
or a monster gradually revealing himself.
At the same time his wife is discovering both the depths and the heights of what she will do to take care of her children.
The film opens on three silhouetted figures and the sounds of children giggling. Two young girls are
inexpertly applying makeup to their mother’s face. Beneath her right eye is a distinctive birthmark,
from a distance it could almost be a black eye, but Sandra (Clare Dunne) asks her daughters not to
cover it up and she relates a sweet story to Emily and Molly about how it makes her special.
Later that afternoon when Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson) arrives home from work his daughters run to
him, still giggling. This man is clearly not a monster. That is, until he sends his daughters out into the
garden. Gary has found some cash that Sandra had hidden and he fears that she could use the
money to leave him. He wants to make her stay, but what he does next is the very thing that will
ensure that Sandra does leave, however reluctant she may have been to take such a vast step into
the unknown.
As it is, Sandra and her daughters find themselves crammed into a tiny room at an airport hotel and
Gary is forced to move back in with his parents. Although Sandra and the girls adapt to their new
situation, using the airport car park as their own roller skating rink, it’s not a long term solution. But
Sandra cannot go back. Nor can she find her girls a permanent home. Like many parts of the western
world prior to the pandemic, Sandra endures long queues for rental properties that are ultimately
unattainable.
It is not until she is snuggled up with the girls one night and her eldest, Emily, relates a
story that she had heard in class that Sandra lights upon a solution.
She will build her own house.
It’s an unlikely undertaking for a single mother working two low paid jobs and not a single skill related to carpentry or building but, as it turns out, it’s still more likely than finding a rental.
However, trouble is brewing in the wings. When he cannot bribe his girls and he fails to persuade
Sandra to come back to him, Gary resorts to guilt trips and manipulation, and finally he turns to
force. This time, using the courts as his bludgeon.
For once, Sandra is intimidated. She is so fearful that she is even prepared to cover up her birthmark,
if that will help to convince the court that she is a responsible and capable mother.
An engaging cast takes this conversation we as a society must have and raises it to a warm and
engrossing story; even as, at the same time, it is a realistic depiction of the tug of longing, the
practical difficulties, the uncertainty and the disruption to their lives that women and children must
endure when they are forced to abandon their home.