Carten’s film opens with a recording of a phone call she once made to her uncle, explaining that she had just seen her mother, Nuala, drunk on a bench in Belfast's city centre. ‘I knew straight away it was Mammy,’ she tells him, ‘cos of the heels’. The film goes on to use phone call recordings and eerily prescient old home movie footage, alongside elements of performance and video installation, to tease out a candid and confronting portrait of a mother-daughter relationship marked by addiction.

With a verité, handheld style that is often interrupted by the film's performative sequences (notably when Nuala plays herself), or some disquieting camera angles shot inside the family home, A Want in Her is at once furious and cathartic – an intricate and intense working-through of trauma and unconditional love.

“Raw, searing... a daughter’s shattering testament to her mother’s absence, presence and endurance... passages of cathartic beauty, grace and even humor.” Variety