A Good Woman is Hard to Find review: Rising star Sarah Bolger and director Abner Pastoll team-up for a dark tale of one mother’s desperation to keep her family safe, no matter the cost.
Image Courtesy of Fantasia Festival
In 2015, director Abner Pastoll debuted his first feature film Road Games. The film was a bi-lingual twisted tale that starred Barbara Crampton and had genre fans taking notice. Now four years later, he has returned with his second movie A Good Woman is Hard to Find. The setting relocates from rural France to urban Ireland as we meet Sarah (Sarah Bolger) and her two children Lucy and Ben. Sarah has had a tough time recently, her husband was murdered in front of her son Ben, whom is now mute. With no money coming in, day-to-day life is a struggle. Then she meets local criminal Tito (Andrew Simpson) who forces her into criminal activities. Events spiral and soon Sarah finds herself entangled deep within a criminal underbelly; desperate to keep her family safe she resorts to extreme methods.
A Good Woman is Hard to Find is very different from Pastoll’s previous film. The pace is slower, the palette more subdued, and the world feels more tangible. Road Games is a great film, but it sticks to some fairly uniform genre tropes, the action all heightened and the acting is the same. This time around, Pastoll is much more firmly placed with the gritty crime thriller. The naturalism of the set, acting, and stark realities of life on the poverty line in England and Ireland, all add up to a more mature storyteller. It’s a true kitchen sink drama with added gangsters, drugs and blood.
‘If you want to get anywhere in this world you have to be a bit of a bitch.’ These words are uttered by protagonist Sarah’s mother towards the start of A Good Woman is Hard to Kill, and so in order to survive, that’s what Sarah does. When we first meet her, she’s a meek, timid mouse, but by the climax she has morphed into a ferocious lioness. It’s a tough journey to portray convincingly, but Bolger handles it deftly. Her metamorphosis is so subtle that her change is almost imperceptible, and is entirely believable. Bolger is fast becoming one to watch, her turn as manic babysitter Emilie demonstrated promise and here Pastoll really lets her shine.
Whilst a great dark crime thriller, A Good Woman is Hard to Find isn’t perfect. The rather simplistic story has been seen before, and it becomes clear fairly early on where things will end-up. Bolger’s performance bolsters the film though, and the overall result is a solid piece of cinema. Pastoll’s second feature, though stylistically and thematically different from Road Games, proves that he is still a new filmmaker to watch.
A Good Woman is Hard to Find was reviewed at Fantasia 2019. It will next screen at Arrow Video Frightfest where it closes the festival, and will arrive on home entertainment platforms later this year.
