Daisy-May Hudson is the British filmmaker who, in 2015, made a very personal documentary about homelessness: her own. Half Way told the story of how she, her mother and her 13-year-old sister lost their homes and then found themselves in the bureaucratic nightmare of hostels and halfway houses, and her camera showed the audience every agonising moment.
Now Hudson has developed these ideas into feature film form in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Ladybird and Cathy Come Home. It’s a passionate, human and urgently acted drama, a vivid look at what it’s like to be forced into screaming agony by the system – and what it’s like to work for the system and be the wall that gets screamed at.
Posy Sterling plays Molly, a single mother who comes out of prison expecting to be immediately reunited with her two young children. She is astonished to discover that her own mother (TerriAnn Cousins), in whose care she had left her children while in prison, has handed them over to social services, saying she is too stressed to take on the role while caring for her dying partner. Now homeless, Molly lives in a tent and cannot get custody of her children. She can only get a single apartment and is therefore not entitled to get them all back.
The film shows that any confrontation with authority is an ordeal of fear, shame and anger for her – especially because she feels she has served her sentence and paid her debt to society, but is now being thrown into a new, insidious kind of prison. Her natural instinct is to angrily demand that these stern, lanyard-wearing council workers simply hand her children over to her. But she is also painfully aware that her actions will be judged as those of a dangerously unstable person with poor mental health. “Am I being tested? Is this what is going on here?” she screams at one point.
And that’s it.
There’s a pretty chilling scene where Molly enters an anonymous-looking room, looking forward to tearful hugs with the children, only to be confronted by an interrogation team of care workers. Molly clearly feels like she’s back at school, like she’s failing a test she didn’t know she had to take – and this is the kind of test you fail just by showing up. All of the officers are women in the “care” business, a gender irony that the film lets us absorb little by little over the course of its running time. Some of them are indifferent, but many of them, quite frankly, aren’t: for them, disowning Molly is their own professional ordeal. And Molly makes things much worse for herself by trying to kidnap the children.
Molly herself doesn’t get much support from her mother, a depressed drinker who, in an early scene, gets Molly to sing in public at her partner’s wake; a rather beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace that poignantly shows us what she was like as a little girl. Her only friend is Amina (Idil Ahmed), who herself lives in a homeless shelter with her child and belatedly helps Molly find her way in the system. A powerful, vehement testimony.
