Myrid Carten (2024)

“Do you think this house is haunted?”

Part-way through her autobiographical feature début, A Want in Her, this is the question that Myrid Carten poses to her mother, Nuala, about the family home in which they both grew up. Throughout the film, we see the London-based visual artist struggle to put distance between herself and the circumstances that keep pulling her back to her childhood home in the Donegal Gaeltacht region of Gweedore. The problem is outlined from the film’s opening moments through an audio recording of a phone call in which Carten learns that her mother is missing, having disappeared from the rehabilitation centre in Belfast where she had been receiving treatment for alcoholism. We soon learn that the sickness afflicting Nuala appears to be genetic; almost every one of her siblings is similarly affected. The only one who has managed to maintain some semblance of stability is Carten’s uncle Kevin who has, perhaps for that very reason, inherited the family home. This home is the nexus that draws Kevin’s siblings back in as they, at different times, navigate periods of addiction and recovery. When Carten arrives home at the beginning of the film to search for her mother, her uncle Danny has recently taken residence and is sleeping, without Kevin’s permission, in a dilapidated mobile home on the grounds of the house. The impossibility of Kevin’s position is highlighted when he is reluctantly forced to call the emergency services to remove Danny, who has become violent and smashed the windows of the mobile home.

While we do not get an explicit answer as to whether Nuala believes the house is haunted, Carten’s choices throughout the film might serve as a response to this question, although there are no easy answers to be found here. This is reflected in the structure of the film. Echewing any traditional narrative structure, Carten opts instead to move back and forth in time, switching between newer footage and home movies that she captured on a mini-DV as a child. In one home movie taken when she was in primary school, Carten’s classmates perform for the camera, acting out a scene in which a concerned wife tries to convince her husband to stop drinking and come home from the pub. Although the children perform for laughs, the scene takes on a sinister edge in this context and is indicative of the cyclical nature of addiction and intergenerational trauma, core themes that are grappled with throughout the film.

Some of the film is shot with a hand-held camera and from a first-person point of view, although Carten often places distance between herself and her subject by filming through windows or discretely from a distance. This is likely necessitated in part by the sensitive nature of what she is filming, but it also resonates with the filmmaker’s struggle to negotiate some means of distancing herself from her mother’s illness. This negotiation is literalised in a recorded conversation featured in the film between Carten and her uncle, Kevin. While Kevin shouts out that he can no longer look after Nuala and that Carten must come home and step up to the plate, she calmly responds that she cannot be responsible and that, at this stage, they must both prioritise themselves. This moment breaks from the cyclical representation of addiction, intervention and recovery that has preceded and, as Kevin concedes that his niece may be right, he offers a suggestion that there is hope for healing.

The issue of control permeates the film’s photography. The camera is a means for Carten to manage and process what is happening, something that is exemplified most clearly when we see her reviewing footage she has taken of her mother. We see Carten watching and editing this footage in office and in gallery settings that are drastically different to her family home. She also frames these scenes differently; the camera is static and the spaces are orderly, even clinical. Within the house the camera is comparatively agile and at times chaotic, intermittently appearing to become untethered from the filmmaker’s point of view to climb the walls and scale the ceilings of empty rooms, suggesting an unidentified presence or spectral perspective. The effect is claustrophobic and unsettling and, in these moments, A Want in Her might have its closest cinematic parallel in found-footage horror. Cecilia Sayad writes about the found-footage horror as inscribed with features traditionally associated with documentary cinema (2016: 43) and, in this context, Carten’s film could be described as a kind of palimpsest illustrating how these same techniques have come to represent a sense of unease and unheimlich, even when applied outside of the sub-genre with which they are primarily associated. In this case the apparatus, neither subjective nor wholly objective, moves unnaturally, impossibly up the walls and surveys the home through a distorted lens like ghostly CCTV.

Sayad links the act of filming in found-footage horror to the need for control, using the example of Paranormal Activity and protagonist Micah’s decision to install security cameras in the bedroom in an attempt to capture and understand what is happening to his wife at night (2016: 43). A Want in Her portrays Carten’s filmmaking process as a similar exercise: she captures confronting and deeply personal footage which we then see her review and edit in controlled spaces. It is similarly reflected in the use of windows as a tool for distancing the filmmaker from the action. The suggestion by Carten that the house might be haunted could imply that the family is somehow cursed, or that her mother’s illness is the spectre that hangs over the place. This seems to be reinforced when Nuala, interviewed by Carten, describes the experience of her episodes as “like being possessed”. However, the use of the filmmaker’s point of view in much of the home footage arguably does not align Nuala, but rather Carten herself, with the film’s spectral presence. Her home movies and shaky point-of-view footage of activities in the house are intercut with the ghostly surveillance of empty rooms. At one point we see Carten enter the house and the action is immediately followed by a cut to the “spectral” point of view. Following the aforementioned phone conversation between Carten and her uncle, Kevin, in which she urges him to step back and stop taking responsibility for Nuala’s recovery, we see the spectral camera cut loose from its claustrophobic position. We move with it as it leaves the house and speeds down country roads, away from the domestic setting, its newfound freedom seemingly correlated with Carten’s realisation that she cannot control her mother’s illness but might still preserve herself by building a life elsewhere.

Carten has spoken about her resistance to the use of voiceover in the film because she “didn’t want to talk from a place in the future”, instead leaving a sense of open-endedness, with a degree of cautious optimism (Carten 2025). She also did not wish to give herself “the last word”, and potentially compromise the immediacy or intimacy of the interactions shown (Carten 2025). Given this context, the camera-spectre’s departure may be interpreted as indicative of the filmmaker’s acceptance that she cannot entirely control this narrative, either, and that it is possible to create something deeply human without having all the answers. Instead, Carten hands this intimate piece of her life over to the viewers and allows them to draw their own conclusions.