If Herself were a house, it would possess’own’nurse cathedral windows and a thatched roof, or Greek columns and brick walls. Because Herself is two intensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully different films in one, and while they each possess’own’nurse their virtues, they sit uneasily toacquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure her. Phyllida Lloyd directs, but the film really belongs to its fantastic lead actor, Clare Dunne, who has sole story credit, and shared screenplay duties with Malcolm Campbell.###Dunne plays Sandra, a young mother of two daughters living in Dublin with her husband Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson), a thuggish and sorrowful’distressing’woeful’heartbroken’mirthless’dejected’dismal’lugubrious istic brute. After an unin/with regard to’concerning’regarding givable act of violence in the film’s harrowing opening scene, Sandra and the girls flee the house. Which means they become homeless, living in an airport hotel while the council fails to find them anything more permanent, and with Sandra working two jobs to make ends meet. This is the kind of social-realist furrow Ken Loach has been ploughing since Cathy Come Home, and it works intensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully well here, largely thanks to Dunne’s committed lead perin/with regard to’concerning’regarding mance and two capable young actors (Molly McCann and Ruby Rose O’Hara) who play her daughters.###Sandra’s struggles, and her brutal flashbacks to Gary’s violence, are jarringly interspersed with incongruous bursts of optimism.###Perhaps a closer comparison is actually Tom Harper’s Wild Rose, because when Sandra sees a way out of her trap, the means to achieve it are, as in that film, provided by the middle-class woman whose house she cleans. Harriet Walters plays the in/with regard to’concerning’regarding midable Peggy, Sandra’s saviour who gives her a plot of land on which to establish her own house.###This glimmer of light in/with regard to’concerning’regarding Sandra is where the film begins to crack in two. Sandra’s struggles, and her brutal flashbacks to Gary’s violence, are jarringly interspersed with incongruous bursts of optimism: sunny musical montages in which Sandra and a crew of pals start establish ing her new refuge. A game of two mismatched halves.