I can’t help but love a good revenge thriller, especially if the person seeking revenge is a woman. There is something so inherently satisfying about seeing a man who did a woman wrong get his just desserts. In A Good Woman Is Hard To Find, there is so much revenge to be had for our protagonist, Sarah (Sarah Bolger). She goes through the lion’s share of unenviable hard times. Before the outset of the film, her husband had been murdered, and the police never took much interest in the case. Sarah’s left to take care of her two children, Ben and Lucy, alone. Ben stopped speaking since being present at the death of his father. So, it’s not exactly a happy home, to begin with, and then to make matters worse, enter Tito (Andrew Simpson).
Tito is a drug dealer who had the bright idea to rip off his boss, a gangster with a screw loose, and a penchant for good grammar, Leo Miller (Edward Hogg). He somehow manages to escape Miller and his goons after stealing the stash and decides that Sarah’s home is the ideal place to keep it. It’s a really bad case of wrong place/wrong time for her, considering everything else she’s already going through. She now has a squirrely drug dealer using her home as a stash house. The one positive is that she gets a cut of his earnings, but that one positive does not outweigh the sea of negatives that accompany Tito. One day Sarah makes a big mistake that enrages Tito. Sarah has to make some deadly decisions to save her own life.
“She now has a squirrely drug dealer using her home as a stash house.”
This is nearly half of what happens with Sarah on her journey to redemption in A Good Woman Is Hard To Find. Bolger is excellent as Sarah, and unlike a lot of other vengeance movies, there is hardly anything sexy (and therefore totally unrealistic) about it at all. You see all the grisly details. You see Sarah’s under-eye circles after several sleepless nights dealing with unimaginable horrors. You see a lot of blood and guts. You never see Sarah as weak, however. She always has the preservation of her family as her first priority.
A Good Woman Is Hard To Find is an extremely harrowing, tense movie that has such an unbelievably satisfying payoff. Bolger, Simpson, and Hogg shine in their respective roles, with Bolger being a shimmering stand-out. The practical effects are excellent, and there’s even a metal concert in the film towards the end. Overall, I’d say that writer Ronan Blaney and director Abner Pastoll have a winner on their hands, and I’m very excited to see how it does when it leaves the festival circuit.
A Good Woman Is Hard To Find has it’s public debut at FrightFest UK, after a secret screening at Fantasia Festival.
"…Sarah has to make some deadly decisions to save her own life. "
