‘Herself’: Irish-Produced Indie Is A Saccharine-inducing Female Empowerment Melodrama [Capsule]

Clare Dunne stars in “Herself” as Sandra Kelly, a determined woman who decides to build her own home in this Dublin-set drama. Dunne co-wrote the screenplay with director Phyllida Lloyd (‘Mamma Mia!’). The result is the kind of saccharine-inducing female empowerment tale that may even give hardcore feminists severe allergies. This low-key narrative has Sandra, a working-class Dublin mother, made homeless when she leaves her verbally and physically abusive husband, Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson). She opts to give the middle finger to the neverending waiting list for public housing by raising money to build her own home from scratch with a loan from the bank, and with a little help from some friends. As it turns out, the friends are bewilderingly generous. They include Peggy (Harriet Walter), a well-off widowed doctor who actually offers Sandra a parcel of the land in her backyard to build the dreamy two-bedroom cottage she so desires for herself and her two young grade-school daughters (Molly McCann and Ruby Rose O’Hara). If that wasn’t enough, Sandra meets a professional builder, Aido (Conleth Hill), who can supervise her construction project practically for free just because he hates Sandra’s ex-husband so much. The ragtag crew assembled is meant to make you feel good about yourself, a kind of triumph of the human spirit moment that includes several cutesie musically edited montages as the crew pours concrete and hammers the nails to build Sandra’s home. If the storyline sounds familiar, that’s because it kind of is. Kevin Kline played a dying architect trying to rebuild his life by way of a shabby home in 2001’s “Life As A House.” It’s the same old tropes in Lloyd’s film, which has a dull-as-paint character indebted in a world of social realist clichés, but Lloyd also ups the melodrama here, all for the sake of female empowerment. The result is nothing short of twee. Kill me now.

Score: C-