A Good Woman Is Hard to Find (2020)
97 min.
Release Date: May 8, 2020 (On Demand)
A good man who treats a woman right is even harder to find in “A Good Woman Is Hard to Find,” a primal, if morally ambiguous, and tightly wound thriller about a demure, newly single mum undergoing a believably harrowing character transformation. Director Abner Pastoll (2016’s “Road Games”) and screenwriter Ronan Blaney are careful not to let their straightforward story fall into one simplistic note of despair or mere exploitation. With a specific, lived-in milieu and more humanity adding texture to a potentially rote revenge saga, “A Good Woman Is Hard to Find” aims for legitimacy rather than just grisly violence over substance and very much succeeds (although “death by vibrator” is ghoulishly inventive).
Desperate and financially strapped after becoming recently widowed, young North Ireland mother Sarah (Sarah Bolger) is just doing her best, raising her two children on her own in a housing estate. She searches for answers, but the police are of no help (“Let sleeping dogs lie”), writing off Sarah’s husband death as just another drug deal gone bad, and her son, who witnessed Daddy being murdered, refuses to speak. Her mother (Jane Brennan) is also not supportive, resentful over Sarah marrying the man that she did. When a thug named Tito (Andrew Simpson) follows Sarah and her kids home and forces his way in to hide from local dealers, she allows him to stash his stolen drugs as long as he doesn’t lay a hand on her children. In order to protect her family and seek justice for her husband's murder, Sarah will have to take desperate measures.
Sarah Bolger, playing a most hellish babysitter in 2016’s nerve-jangling “Emelie,” is riveting here as Sarah, a good woman, not to mention a good mother. She is instantly worth our cares, being the object of judgment by a lewd grocer, police officers, and even her own mother, who disparages Sarah as "soft." A coincidence or two may push the plot along, but as each tension-fraught predicament pushes Sarah to the edge (aided by composer Matthew Pusti's propulsive synth-heavy score), Bolger makes the character's emotions palpably stinging and commands her journey to its cathartic end. The lead antagonist, Leo Miller (Edward Hogg), is a hissable one and even a little more interesting than the standard-issue drug dealer in movies; Leo corrects Sarah’s grammar at one point and gets angry if one mistakes a simile for a metaphor. Carving out a place for itself in the enduring #MeToo sub-genre, “A Good Woman Is Hard to Find” is a satisfying primal scream.
Grade: B
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