In Ireland, there is the unstated assumption and, indeed expectation, that people, women especially, will keep their heads down, eyes to the floor – no matter what injustices they have suffered. But Natasha O’Brien did not receive the memo and spoke out after she was brutally assaulted in Limerick in 2022 and her attacker received a suspended sentence.
Her case caused a national outcry and was regarded as one more sign of official indifference towards an epidemic of violence against women. This being Ireland, people also have something to say about a woman who used her voice, and O’Brien received a lot of hatred online, as she reveals in Kathleen Harris’s compellingly meditative and dreamlike Natasha (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm).
A moving and thought-provoking documentary, Natasha sets itself the difficult challenge of reporting in a straightforward fashion on the assault on O’Brien by former Defence Forces member Cathal Crotty and the Director of Public Prosecution’s subsequent appeal against the lenient sentence, while also capturing O’Brien’s state of mind.
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Harris’s strategy is to figuratively sit at O’Brien’s shoulder and to capture the rush of emotions – positive and negative – as her case becomes a national lightning rod. It’s a disorientating experience – as it was for O’Brien, who, being human, has her moments of doubt and cries the day after Crotty receives a two-year jail term on appeal.
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Natasha opens with O’Brien recalling a childhood trauma: “I was swimming in the sea, a wave took me under. I was helplessly accepting I was being pulled under. There was nothing I could do.” That experience seems to have foreshadowed the assault she suffered at the hands of Crotty after she and a friend intervened as he and a number of other men yelled homophobic abuse at another passerby.
“The last thing he said before [he] started punching me was, ‘Oh, you’re a dirty lesbian’. That first punch just hooked me, it was so powerful. They kept coming: right hook after right hook,” O’Brien recalls.
Her injuries were extensive: bruising all over the legs, arms and back, a broken nose – and a concussion that left her at high risk of a potentially fatal brain bleed. But despite speaking out about the leniency of the sentence, O’Brien explains that she does not always see her moral strength as a positive – maybe it would be easier if she just let things go. “I spent time wishing I was different,” she says. “I don’t make my life easy by keeping my head up and speaking my mind. It doesn’t make my life easy, and it never has.”
As director, Harris skilfully teases out O’Brien’s relationship with her parents, who separated when she was a child. Her father, Joe, is stoically supportive, but sparks fly between O’Brien and her mother, Anne. “We speak less, we hardly speak at all,” says her mother.
Gender violence has reached epidemic proportions the support group Women’s Aid said recently, and those statistics mirror the experience of O’Brien, Meav McLoughlin-Doyle and Bláthnaid Raleigh, who talk about surviving physical assault and sexual violence. “My ex-husband will get six years,” says McLoughlin-Doyle. “The trauma of what happened to myself and my children will last a lifetime.”
As is only correct, Natasha makes for sober viewing. But there is tremendous poignancy in the final scene of O’Brien and her mother at the beach, staring out to sea. It would be trite to say that O’Brien has achieved closure, and the film does not seek to impose that narrative on her. But there is empathy and togetherness between daughter and mother, and after all the physical and emotional pain O’Brien has suffered and the treatment she went through at the hands of the justice system, it is tremendously heartening to see her looking to the future with hope.
Natasha can be streamed on RTÉ Player
