Review: A Good Woman Is Hard to Find Is a Rare Bird, Until It Isn’t

A colleague described Abner Pastoll’s A Good Woman Is Hard to Find as a horror film version of Ken Loach’s recent Sorry We Missed You—an astute observation that underscores a similarity between kitchen-sink dramas and crime thrillers from the U.K. In both types of films, characters are often stymied by systemic poverty and injustice, but thrillers frequently offer the catharsis of violent fantasy that occasionally suggest a balancing of social ledgers. If the two films in this case are seen close together, A Good Woman Is Hard to Find could scan as a daydream that the frazzled wife of Loach’s production may have entertained while riding the bus to and from her hospice patients.

Like the characters in Sorry We Missed You, Sarah (Sarah Bolger) spends every moment of her waking life trying to avoid calamity. Single with two young children, Ben (Rudy Doherty) and Lucy (Macie McCauley), Sarah is lonely and mourning the mysterious death of her husband while contending with limited money and the relentless condescension of nearly everyone, particularly men. The film’s first act buzzes with an unusual and eerie impression of randomness, as menace seems to casually encroach Sarah from every angle: a grocery store manager flirtatiously hassles her over a candy bar that Ben eats, which Sarah can’t afford; Sarah’s mother, Alice (Jane Brennan), makes cryptic allusions to the murder of her husband; and a drug dealer, Tito (Andrew Simpson), rips drugs off a couple of other hoods near Sarah’s house. Above all, there’s the ongoing fear of the children misbehaving or screwing up, which happens often, and which is understood to be capable of unleashing disaster in terms of money expenditure and the intrusion of unsympathetic police officers, doctors, and so on. (Incidentally, Sorry We Missed You is also quite vividly consumed with this fear.)

These incidents are emblematic of the filmmakers’ empathy for Sarah. There’s a moment in A Good Woman Is Hard to Find that’s more imaginative, and seemingly torn from human experience, than any scene in Loach’s production. Sarah is about to use her vibrator only to discover that it needs batteries. Having none, she checks her remote controls, which are dead, and scrambles around until she finally removes the batteries from of one of her children’s toys with a butter knife. Despite the bloodshed that eventually occurs Sarah’s home, and which is telegraphed by the opening image, this sequence is the most suspenseful in the film, as we’re led to desperately wish for this woman to experience this modicum of pleasure. The moment also illustrates how poverty informs and limits every element of life, affecting one’s notions of personal agency, including sexual power. Often looking frazzled, Sarah is criticized by many for her appearance, and she radiates an exhausted hopelessness, which she can barely relieve even late at night, with the kids in bed, in the sanctity of her home.

The vibrator also foreshadows a wicked joke. Sarah and Tito collide when he takes over her house, hiding the drugs inside her bathroom. Initially, Tito isn’t quite the vicious thug of most Desperate Hours-style thrillers, as he seems to want to play a perverse kind of house with Sarah—a notion which only makes him scarier, for suggesting a nightmarish inversion of Sarah’s desire for her husband’s return. When Tito dramatically oversteps his bounds, Sarah stabs him in the eye with the vibrator, asserting herself for the first time in the film, turning a fake cock against a figurative dick who comes to resemble an extreme version of every asshole who taunts Sarah on a daily basis. Such a rebellion will not be permitted in a world that sees people like Sarah as pitiful, and so a stream of atrocities is unleashed.

After Tito spectacularly exits the picture, the film’s seemingly random, initially scary details are revealed to be part of a governing theme. Pastoll and screenwriter Ronan Blaney have loaded the narrative with pop-psych feminist tropes, as Sarah learns to respect herself, dress sexy again, and battle her oppressors. (The film’s most notable image, of Sarah drenched in blood, recalls famous scenes from other female-driven thrillers such as Carrie and The Descent.) As it grows preachy, A Good Woman Is Hard to Find loses its juice, reverting to formula, as Sarah inexplicably becomes a super woman who mows down gang members without compunction. Pastoll betrays the livewire suspense of his early scenes, which turn the stuff of paying bills and managing kids into manna for an unsettlingly intimate domestic thriller. Humans are fairly rare in genre films, while killer badasses are a dime a dozen.