Parky At the Pictures (20/6/2025)

(Reviews of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life; The Last Journey; A Sip of Irish; and Holloway)

JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE.

Considering that 16 December 2025 will see the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of this country's most influential and enduringly popular novelists, it seems apt that the protagonist of Laura Piani's Jane Austen Wrecked My Life believes herself to have been born in the wrong century.

Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) works at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She cycles everywhere since surviving the car crash that killed her parents and lives with her sister, Mona (Alice Butaud) and her young son, Tom (Roman Angel). Despite longing to be a writer, she struggles to finish stories in her creative writing class and resents being teased by co-worker Félix (Pablo Pauly). However, when Agathe is inspired to write a story after seeing a face in her sake cup at a Chinese restaurant, Félix sends it off and she is awarded a place on the two-week Jane Austen Residency in England.

Touched by Félix's faith in her and by his readiness to drive her north to the ferry, Agathe feels compelled to kiss him on the rainy quayside. On the other side of the Channel, she's met by Oliver Lowe (Charlie Anson), whose parents run the residency in their country house. He is Jane Austen's great-great-great grandnephew, but doesn't rate her writing. After the throws up on his shoes because of her vehicular anxiety, he also takes against Agathe, who complains about him on the phone to Mona when his sports car breaks down in the woods, only to discover that he speaks fluent French.

When they're forced to sleep in the car, Agathe loudly whistles `La Marseillaise' to stop Oliver from snoring and he takes pleasure in the fact that she struggles to get down from an apple cart after they accept a lift home the following morning. Mother Beth (Liz Crowther) is more welcoming, although Agathe is spooked when she learns that she will have to read out her stories to the other students. Relieved to be alone in her room, she strips off and barges through what she thinks is the door to the bathroom, only to find herself naked in Oliver's bedroom.

Wandering the grounds, Agathe imagines what Chéryl (Annabelle Lengronne), Olympia (Lola Peploe), Sybil (Rodrigue Pouvin) might be writing and feels intimidated. She's put out when the politicised Olympia attacks her ideas on the purpose of fiction, but senses Oliver is on her side. Agather is also concerned about his father, Todd (Alan Fairbairn), who reminds her of her Bristol-born father and seems to be exhibiting signs of dementia, although she's amused when he pours water over the over-heating Olympia.

Mortified when she accidentally sends Félix a raunchy voicemail, Agathe struggles to write and trips over in the woods when a llama spits in her face. She finds a bicycle and heads for the village, where she bumps into Oliver in a curiosity shop and they confess their relationship shortcomings and Oliver admits to having been suspended by his university for smashing up the common room on discovering that his partner had slept with most of his colleagues. He's also worried about Todd, who wanders around the garden with no trousers reciting poetry.

With Olympia and Cheryl feeling cheesed off, they drag Agathe off to the pub. She has called Félix to ask if he's ghosting her because of the kiss, but enjoys flirting with Oliver over a drunken game of darts. She's too sloshed for sex, however, and wakes next morning to find Félix standing over her because he wants to be her partner at the residency's costume ball. Shocked to see him, she is embarrassed when he takes Oliver for a servant bringing a breakfast tray and she throws up.

At the ball, Agathe dances with Félix, but feels peculiar and fobs him off on Beth. As she tries to flee, she's swept up by Oliver, who stares deep into her eyes when they dance. However, Félix interjects and they end up tumbling into bed, where she realises they are better of as best friends. Taking the rejection well, Félix leaves the next morning and wishes Agathe luck at the group reading. But she knows she's written nothing at the residency and apologises to Beth before sneaking away.

As there are no buses on Sundays, Oliver drives Agathe to the ferry. He urges her not to give up her writing and suggests she needs to find a ruin to work in because words are like ivy. She goes to the family seaside cottage and feels her parents supporting spirit. Initially writing by hand, she is soon tapping away and mails the manuscript to Oliver.

Life returns to normal at the shop, with Félix hanging out at Mona's after work. One night, Agathe gets a letter from a London publisher who adores her book. Next day, she finds a note on the `mirror of love' addressed to her and quoting Jane Austen. Suddenly, she no longer feels like Anne Elliot from Persuasion and, following a poetry reading at the shop, she spots Oliver at the back of the room. Pushing her way through, she sees him on the pavement outside and they kiss.

With the casting of ace documentarist Frederick Wiseman as the poet going some way to atone for the slopping plotting of Agathe finding inspiration, a supply of A4 paper, and a working printer at a long-closed holiday home, this is an amiable, if commonplace romcom that depends heavily on the excellence of Camille Rutherford. But Agathe is the only character developed beyond plotline necessity and, thus, her interactions with the other guests or their hosts feel strained. There's a spark with Pablo Pauly's lovelorn workmate, but Charlie Anson seems weighed down by the burden of being Darcy to Brigitte Jones and even seeks refuge in Firth/Grant-like grimaces before a climactic embrace that's utterly lacking in passion.

The residency idea bears echoes of Jerusha Hess's Austenland (2013), although Piani is markedly less frivolous in her approach to the tried-and-tested Austen tropes (although there is little evidence of the author wrecking anyone's life). Indeed, there's a sadness to the way in which Beth watches helplessly as the man she loves slowly disappears and Piani might have been advised not to have Todd trouserless so often, as it implies a toxicity to his antics that seems unfounded. Too little is also made of the splendid setting, with no sense of the shabby grandeur coming across. Similarly, Piani is reluctant to delve into the story's intellectual aspects, with the result that this is always more about emotions than ideas and, as a result, often feels formulaic and melodramatic. We never once, for example, get to learn what Agathe is writing about and the notion that her sudden outpouring of middlebrow creativity would find a pathetically grateful publisher is taradiddlish fantasy.

Pierre Mazoyer's photography is serviceable, as is Peter von Poehl's score. But there's something cloying about everyone knowing the dance steps at a ball that is filled with costumed folk who have materialised from nowhere and conveniently vanish again. As does Félix, whose unheralded arrival after days of phone silence sums up a script that never quite knows whether it is satirising literary clichés and stereotypes or lamenting their absence in our soulless times in which romance is fast becoming a lost art.

THE LAST JOURNEY.

In 2007, Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson made a documentary series about the former's sister. Running for four seasons, I en annan del av Köping (aka In Another Part of Köping) made a celebrity out of Linda by showing how she dealt with her learning difficulties. Clearly, Filip hoped he could repeat the trick with The Last Journey, in which he seeks to restore the spark that his father, Lars, has lost since retiring after 40 years of teaching French at the local high school.

In Sweden, Filip och Fredrik are on a par with Ant and Dec. Former journalists, they have become media darlings with their quirky TV shows, books, and podcasts. However, they had never made a full-length feature before and it soon becomes apparent that whisking Lars off to his beloved France is going to be a trickier assignment than they had envisaged.

Lars Hammar believed he was embarking upon his `troisième âge' when he retired in 2008. Instead, he lost interest in life and slumped deeper into his Belgian armchair. Wife Tiina is still active and son Filip becomes determined to get his old father back. After a series of medical tests prove he's in good physical shape, Filip finds some old movies and audio recordings and decides that a return to the old family holiday destination of Beaulieu-sur-Mer will restore Lars's joie de vivre. As he's going to need a bit of help along the way, he invites Fredrik Wikingsson to join them and he squeezes into the back of a newly acquired orange Renault 4 that is identical to the on in which the family used to travel across Europe.

Lars is reluctant to make the trip, but settles into listening to his old tapes as they drive along. He even confesses to once losing his temper with a taxi driver in the 1960s. But he cracks a bone during a nocturnal fall in Malmö and has to spend a weekend in hospital while Filip and Fredrik take the ferry and head west in `the most overtaken car in Europe', as the Renault struggles to get above 40mph. While Tiina coaxes Lars out of feeling sorry for himself, Fredrik wonders whether Filip has arranged the trip to avoid facing the reality that his father is ageing and increasingly frail and that the prospect of him snapping out of lethargy into vibrancy is highly unlikely.

Filip despairs that Lars always talks about declining friends when they chat on the phone. Yet he refuses to accept that he might have to bathe his father en route, even though he has already had to change his underwear after he had wet himself during his hotel fall. Once again, Fredrik challenges his friend to examine his motives for the expedition and to accept that he has to come to terms with some hang-ups of his own. But Filip refuses to quit and, having seen Jacques Brel's statue in Brussels, he sends a soundalike to the hospital to sing a few chansons and this perks up Lars sufficiently to get him walking again.

He flies to Luxembourg and Filip and Fredrik meet him on the border so that he can drive them into France. Well, steer, as the boys have to push the car. But Lars seems brighter and enjoys hearing the tapes and the old songs, as well as the glorious countryside through which they're passing. He insists on stopping at a church to confess his taxi rant from six decades earlier and confides that, at 80, he feels his time is near. At dinner, he struggles to get food on his fork, but he jokes that he fell for France because his mother put a beret on his head when he was five. Moreover, he liked the sound of a country where everyone ignores stop signs and behaves as if they are their own president.

As Filip helps him tilt a wine glass, Lars recalls the time he bumped into an old student who was down on his luck. He was thrilled that his old teacher had remembered his name and Lars counts this among his finest moments, as he always felt his job was to help young people see their way forward. The salary might not have been great, but the perks lasted a lifetime. Filip is touched by his story and cheered by the fact that Lars gets a bit cocky when he declares his ratatouille to be the best in the world.

Having negotiated an assisted shower, Lars is on good form as they drive south. He tells a story about a parrot that drank out of his beer glass and is pleased with the laugh he gets. On reaching Beaulieu, he is even more delighted to enter the same apartment that they had always booked and he warns of the noisy trains that pass below before gazing out over the Mediterranean. Exhausted, Lars takes a nap, but he has breached a gap of 20 years and feels good.

Filip remembers his father sitting on the balcony with friends and relating an anecdote about Harry Belafonte, pausing the punchline so that the train had passed. Eager to recreate the moment, Filip invites some old friends to the apartment and has Fredrik ride the train so he can time the story to the precise second. However, Lars has trouble with his wine glass and the train has gone before he starts to speak. His son is pleased he remembered the gag, but Fredrik chides him for trying to manufacture new memories in the hope that Lars will suddenly become his old self.

Next day, Lars asks to go to Sète to visit the grave of singer Georges Brassens. He was a particular hero, as he stood up for the little man and Filip is delighted when Lars breaks into song before laying flowers. Emotions get the better of him, however, and they don't stay long, but Lars clearly cherished the moment. Fredrik engineers another when he hires some local actors to enact a traffic set-to outside the café where Lars is sitting - because he always felt that French bad manners were a sign of freedom. Having been through a series of rehearsals, the actors are chuffed when Lars grins at the woman motorist slapping the man blocking the road and Filip is overjoyed at seeing his father treasuring an altercation from the good old days. One can only imagine how much he will have relished the Macron tiff.

Using his dictaphone, Lars marvels at how much Filip remembers of their holidays and is grateful for the effort he has made. They rewatch the 1982 World Cup semi-final in vintage French shirts and Lars confides that he has missed these father/son moments. Wandering down memory lane, he begins to move more easily (despite still needing a walker) and the camera picks up the shared pleasure being taken in each activity, no matter how trivial.

While Fredrik goes in search of a parrot, Filip takes Lars shopping to make ratatouille. Their good spirits evaporate, however, when Lars has trouble cutting the ingredients and reads his son's anguish at watching him so diminished as disappointment that he's no longer the dad of his childhood. Abandoning the beer-drinking bird bit, Filip takes Lars for a quiet tipple and reassures him that he's proud of everything about the trip. To prove the point, they head to the beach for a screening of some video messages from pupils past, who concur that Lars was as fine a man as he was a teacher.

Both dab tears, as Lars avers that it would be churlish not to be more engaged after that. But he jokes he can wait for a while to have his ashes scattered on the beach. He records on tape that he's had a wonderful time and is amused when Lars calls into the house to give him a special straw for drinking his wine. He looks briefly into the lens as if to affirm that his plan has paid off.

Bending the rules of actuality to suit themselves, Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson are rewarded with a film of genuine wit and warmth. The latter merits praise for withdrawing discreetly behind the camera to leave the space for his friend to reconnect with the father who was and is. Lars shows great courage in allowing himself to be filmed and the co-directors are always aware of the need to retain his dignity. But this is as much a study of filial acceptance as it is of paternal rejuvenation and it's bound to strike chords with children of all ages. That said, it is possible to see how some may view this as self-aware and exploitative,

Ready to include gambits that failed to pay off, as well as the emotional highs, Hammar and Wikingsson buy themselves the credit to stage-manage the odd sequence. But it's the moments of spontaneity that live longest, such as the beam on Lars's face while watching the traffic fracas (apparently, he didn't know it had been faked until he saw the finished film) and the agony at the chopping board. Erik Persson and Erik Vallsten capture the passing scenery with unforced artistry, while editors Johan Kjellberg and Robin Wikner deftly incorporate the 8mm home movies and old holiday snaps to make this feel akin to a time-hopping travelogue. Christian Olsson's score is also impeccably judged in underscoring the mood shifts. But one can't help feeling that the moving moments following the beach projection should have played out solely to the sound of the sea.

A SIP OF IRISH.

Before he sought to get to the heart of national psyches in Quintessentially British (2022) and Quintessentially Irish (2024), director Frank Mannion had raised a glass to the prince of wines in Sparkling: The Story of Champagne (2021). He ventures back into tipple territory in his latest odyssey, as he examines the unique contribution made by his homeland to viticulture, distilling, and brewing in A Sip of Irish.

Cannily, the tour begins in Tinahely in County Wicklow, where Joe Hayden takes enormous pride in the Friesian Holstein cows who produce the key ingredient for Baileys Irish Cream. These 230 `ladies' are pampered in the lush pastures on the farm that had been in the family since 1865 and Hayden reveals that the likes of the inquisitive Violet like a bit of rock`n'roll to keep them in fine fettle.

Oz Clare recalls how Tom Jago invented Baileys in 1972 for W&A Gilbey, while Hayden explains the reason for the change in bottle shape before showing us St Patrick's Well. The saint blessed the water in the 5th century after having studied at the monastery at Île Saint-Honorat, which gives Mannion the excuse to renew acquaintance from his previous film with Prince Albert of Monaco, who is proud of his Irish links through his mother, Grace Kelly. He also notes the Grimaldi connection to the abbey, which makes a fine wine.

There's no time to linger, however, as we're off to Glounthaune in East Cork to meet Kate Watson at Killahora Orchards, where the cidery was co-founded by her husband Dave and his cousin, Barry Walsh. Their products are enthusiastically endorsed by chef Anna Haugh, while Lisa O'Doherty, the sommelier at The K Club, gives a shout out to one of the few people producing wine on Irish soil. Across the water in France, however, a number of big brands have Irish origins.

Lilian, Mélanie, and Damien Barton Sartorious from the Château Léoville Barton acknowledge the Irish impact in Bordeaux and Kingsley Aikins from The Networking Institute introduces us to the Wine Geese, who left Ireland following the Williamite War and fought with the French for the Jacobite cause before founding vineyards that helped transform wine-making in the region. Clarke takes up the story by reeling off the various Irish associations, including the Samuel Pepys-linked assertion that Haut Brion was founded by a man named O'Brien.

Kinou Cazes Hachemian flies the flag for including Château Lynch-Bages, which has Galway roots and a place in history, as Patrick Baudry took a bottle of red into space aboard the Discovery shuttle in 1985. Véronique Dausse recalls how a Tipperary family founded Château Phélan Ségur, which joins up with some of the other 14 Irish vineyards to participate in the Marathon du Médoc that has been held in the Gironde since 1985 and has become known as the world's slowest race because of its 34 drink stops.

Clarke draws attention to two other Irish contributions, as Thomas Read patented the corkscrew known as `The Coaxer', while glassmaker Pierre Mitchell created the standard Bordeaux bottle shape, as well as inventing the Jeroboam. Down in Provence, Andersonstown native Patrick McKillen launched Chateau La Coste, which boasts an architectural contribution by Bob Dylan (among many others) and a reputation for rosé that is bolstered by Daniel Kennedy, the manager of the estate's art centre, who waxes lyrical about Damien Hirst and Sean Scully exhibitions.

Taking us further afield, Mannion meets Bo Barrett, the CEO of Chateau Montelena in Calistoga, California, whose white wine triumphed over its French rivals at a 1976 tasting that became known as `The Judgement of Paris'. Barrett is particularly pleased that he was played by Chris Pine in Randall Miller's film account of the event, Bottle Shock (2008). And, sticking with the film theme, Clarke commends the Two Paddocks wine produced by Sam Neill in New Zealand.

In Sussex, Limerick exile Dermot Sugrue is making sparkling wines after becoming hooked on home-brewing as a teenager. But the focus now shifts to whiskey and whether the Irish were distilling it before the Scots. However, as Lisa O'Doherty reveals, the War of Independence and Prohibition had a calamitous impact on export sales and the number of distilleries dropped from 75 to three. However, a renaissance has begun, with Michael Flatley playing his part.

Mannion goes to the legendary Midleton distillery in County Cork to meet blender Deirdre O'Carroll. She takes us through the process and mentions that Green Spot matures in wine caskets provided by Bo Barrett. Even so, an `angel's share' is always lost to the elements from each of the seven iconic brands distilled on the premises, including Powers and Redbreast. The discussion moves on to Irish coffee and O'Carroll claims it for the Foynes Flying Boat Terminal, where Joe Sheridan mixed coffee, whiskey, and heavy Irish cream for the first time in 1943.

We see a photo of Marilyn Monroe sipping an Irish coffee before Mannion takes himself off to the Ballyfin Demesne in County Laois, where he samples a venison dish and a flambé coffee before chatting with general manager Peter White about the nine-year restoration job on the Regency-era mansion and some of the famous guests who have stayed there. But food-and-beverage director Damien Marique and Oz Clarke brings us back to wine so that Philippe Bascaules can tell us about the expensive wines produced at Château Margaux, which has links to the Kirwan and Mac Carthy families, who were pioneers in the art of blending.

Richard Hennessy decided to try his hand at brandy and cognac connoisseur Oxana Popkova is given a potted history of the man from Killavullen who decided to settle after being wounded fighting the British at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745. He also goes on to include the Prince Regent and LeBron James in the story of the Hennessys (an anglicisation of Ó hAongusa) before clinking glasses in a toast.

But the next item on the menu is Irish stew and Anna Haugh and Riyadh Khalaf extol the virtues of a signature dish that was the point of departure for Myrtle Allen, whose quiet culinary revolution at Ballymaloe is being carried on by the House Hotel's executive head chef, Dervilla O'Flynn, and head pastry chef, J.R. Ryall. The latter serves a Carrageen moss pudding, which combines seaweed, coffee and whiskey.

A quick hop takes us to The Devonshire pub in London, where co-owner Oisín Rogers reminisces about restoring the pub and making it an open space for Irish musicians. He recalls learning barcraft at the Stag's Head in Dublin and laments the decline of service etiquette in Britain. He's joined by Rory Guinness, who talks about the Iveagh Trust housing project and the launch of Guinness 0.0. But Clarke highlights the emergence of new beers like Kinnegar Scraggy Bay IPA, while rolling his eyes at the company name behind the Muff Liquor potato gin and vodka brands.

While Irish drinks are finding new markets globally, Mannion pauses to remember that Guinness was based on the stout that porters drank in Covent Garden and that John Jameson was from Alloa in Scotland (a fact O'Carroll describes as Ireland's best-kept secret). But all agree that the unique talent for receptiveness and dissemination has enabled Irish people to venture worldwide and assimilate and innovate wherever they fetch up.

Although the French plumped for St Vincent, the patron saint of viticulture in Germany, Austria, and Croatia is St Martin. He was an Irish monk and there is an evangelising feel to this warm-hearted documentary. Every now and then, it slips into infomercialise. But Mannion has the happy knack of coaxing people to talk with erudition and enthusiasm and, consequently, this is not only educational, buy it's also hugely enjoyable.

Doting cowman Joe Hayden and Midleton blender Deirdre O'Carroll are easily the most engaging speakers, with the latter's delight at an article about Redbreast 12 in a student magazine that Mannion had edited being as winning as her aside on her mammy's rules for making Irish coffee. Despite it selling a record 20,000 pints of Guinness a week, time hangs a little heavy in the Devonshire, while we didn't really need to know about what the staff at Ballyfin thought of the Clooneys and Kim Kardashian when they were guests. There's also a rushed feel to the comments snatched on red carpets with comedian Pat Shortt. singer Una Healy, presenter Laura Whitmore, and broadcaster Ryan Tubridy, who is involved in the Muff Liquor enterprise with Ronan Keating and Russell Crowe.

But Oz Clarke proves a knowledgeable guide when it comes to the Wine Geese (although some of this terroirtory had previously been covered in Quintessentially Irish) and his deft way of contextualising the names being bandied about is highly useful. But Mannion is his own on-screen secret weapon, as he's such a genial presence and his rapport with the likes of Hayden and O'Carroll ensures that this smooth, but heady brew slips down as easily as a 6-7°C pint from St James's Gate. Take it from the nephew-in-law of the man who co-invented the widget.

HOLLOWAY.

Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson have already demonstrated their courage on film. The latter won the BAFTA Breakthrough award for depicting her family's experience of homelessness in Half Way (2015), while the former received an Emmy nomination for chronicling her search for the person who had deepfaked pornographic images of herself in Another Body (2023). Now, the pair show compassion and commitment to a cause, as they expose in Holloway the way in which the British penal system punishes the vulnerable victims of poverty, neglect, abuse, and addiction it should be helping.

When it closed in 2016, HM Prison Holloway was the largest women's prison in Europe. A year before it was due to be demolished, Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson invited six former inmates - Tamar Mujanay, Gerrah Selby, Aliyah Ali, Mandy Ogunmokun, Sarah Cassidy, and Brenda Birungi (aka Lady Unchained) - to return and spend five days discussing their lives before and after their time behind bars. Rather than taking the form of confessional interviews, however, the film would turn around group sessions led by facilitator Lorraine Maher and therapist Maria Takaendisa.

None of the women is identified, as they walk through the open front gate. One recalls being in the van driving through the streets and wondering whether the pedestrians gave a thought about the passengers. Another pauses in the place where she `lost' her hair, while another requests a break on entering her first cell because the emotion is so overwhelming.

On Day One, Lorraine gathers the women in a circle and gets them to stand when they fall into self-suggested life experience categories. She then asks them to portray their first night inside, which some find easier to do than others, although Aliyah questions whether Mandy and Sarah found it quite as cushy as they claim it to have been.

Aliyah causes another exercise to be scrapped because she claims she finds it impossible to feel safe within a group environment. As she wanders the corridors, she explains that she was a child of the system, as she had spent time in children's homes before Holloway and had learned to withdraw into herself in order to cope. She admits that she still has demons and finds it hard to drop the guard of self-reliance that has helped her get through.

On Day Two, Mandy reaches out to Aliyah by revealing that she was abused as a child and had to learn to accept her blamelessness. This confidence is appreciated, as Aliyah finds it difficult to forgive her younger self for some of her decisions.

During an exercise, Sarah claims she approached prison as a break from everyday hardship and found serving time a breeze. By contrast, Mandy explains how being an addict and repeat offender, she went 11 years without seeing her children, while Aliyah laments the self-destruction she had witnessed, particularly among those who didn't find safety in numbers. Brenda questions Sarah about her `holiday camp' claim and she insists that three meals a day and a bed seemed sweet after her previous experiences. Mandy backs her up by saying she felt at home in Holloway and acknowledges that it saved her life a few times because of her drug use. But she finds it sad that she felt shielded from harsh realities like her son dying.

Day Three begins with a debate about content control and Mandy's reluctance to speak on camera and find things she would rather keep private finding their way into the documentary. Aliyah and Tamar propose that the camera remains outside the circle to prevent it from becoming intrusive or distracting. It's agreed that their welfare matters more than recording memorable testimony. The session proves intense, with all but Aliyah responding to a body-touching exercise with stories of pain, rejection, and trauma. Eventually, she rushes out and Maria follows to give her a consoling hug, as she explains that she has kept stuff bottled for so long as part of her coping mechanism. The others join them on an outdoor walkway and it's clear that the sense of communality that Aliyah had found so threatening is now becoming supportive.

On Day Four, they produce drawings to chart their journeys, with Gerrah being arrested as an animal rights activist, Tamar being busted for a fight outside her school, Sarah being charged for stealing flowers to place at the spot where her best friend had been murdered, and Aliyah joining county lines drug gangs and being charged for dealing, which she reckons was the first thing she had been any good at. All the women tell of broken homes, with some describing violence against their mothers by toxic boyfriends.

Mandy is too angry to speak, as she shares this sense of being let down by a system that did nothing to help, from children's homes to prison - and it infuriates her that kids are condemned by circumstances they can do nothing to shape and that they then spend the rest of their lives trying to get by and fathom why this happened to them. Several women concur that the were deprived of their childhoods, but they also now see that their mothers had been entrapped, too, and that they needed to feel safe themselves and never really did.

On Day Five, they play a game in which they take forward steps if they fall into certain categories. At the end, Lorraine urges them to see that they are not to blame for what has happened to them and that they should not feel ashamed. They see her point, but most don't feel ready to make the assertion. Sitting together for the final time, they make summation statements and are grateful for the chance to have bonded and to have recognised that women are powerful when they find their voices.

Joking about walking in single file, as they head towards the exit, the women leave behind the ramshackle buildings, with their peeling paint and vegetation growing through walls, floors, and windows. Gerrah finds this fitting, as it shows how bastions can crumble and that Nature will triumph. In their last circle, Tamar thanks Mandy for being a mother figure, Brenda lauds Aliyah for her determination to help young women through her charity, and Brenda commends Sarah for being a survivor who will one day find peace.

As the women wander away from the place that once detained them, captions reveal that 70% of women in prison have been victims of domestic abuse, while 30% spent time in care as children, and another 30% had experienced physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. But Compton and Hudson end on positive notes by revealing that Tamar is now at drama school; Brenda is a poet and activist; Gerrah campaigns on animal and environmental issues, while also being a prison abolitionist; Aliyah is the CEO of Daddyless Daughters; Mandy is the CEO of the Treasures Foundation helping women break free of addiction; and Sarah is a new mum hoping to set up a catering business.

One can only hope that they all succeed with their endeavours and that the fortitude and forthrightness demonstrated here inspires women in the same situation and alerts law-makers to the fact that the penal system has to be radically overhauled to that it stops punishing the person as well as the crime and prepares prisoners for a positive step forward after their release rather than returning them into a never-ending generational cycle that can only end in one way.

Faint echoes of Jack Lee's Turn the Key Softly (1953) reverberate around most British films about women in prison. But the biggest influence on this documentary appears to be Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous's The Work (2017), in which inmates at the infamous Folsom Prison underwent a rigorous four-day group therapy course. Similar emotions bubble to the surface, as the connection between criminality and social circumstance is established through the heartfelt testimonies. But it's never entirely clear what the film-makers are trying to achieve or why they have chosen this particularly methodology.

Maybe Compton and Hudson might have been advised to go for a similarly abstract title, as the reference to Holloway feels a little misleading. All six women were incarcerated there, but we learn more about their backstories than we do about their experiences behind bars. There's nothing about daily routines, relationships with other prisoners, or the discipline imposed by the governor and the guards. Obviously, Holloway has a forbidding 164-year history, as many Suffragettes and other political prisoners were detained here, while Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain here in 1955. More recently, Sarah Reed, a woman with a history of mental health issues and a victim of police brutality died there on remand in 2016. The co-directors have made it plain this isn't a study of the institution, but they make enough `scenic' use of the decaying interiors to have included something of a contextualising nature about the regime and about the socio-psychological nature of the impact it had upon inmates who had frequently arrived bearing the scars of juvenile mistreatment.

Otherwise, this is a film that speaks for itself and Compton and Hudson were wise in leaving the floor open to the ex-prisoners and the in loco pairing of Lorraine Maher and therapist Maria Takaendisa. By keeping a distance, they allow the women to make tentative connections that develop over the week into bonds of support and trust. Perhaps the closing captions might have included something about whether the group members have remained in touch or gone their separate ways. Their bravery in committing to a project that doesn't always seem to run smoothly is humbling in the extreme. Yet, for all the cathartic benefits that the sextet accrue, one can't quite shake the nagging notion that this poignant and often potent exposé isn't quite as devastating or damning as it appears on the surface, as the women are coaxed through a handful of standard therapy sessions into coming to terms before the cameras stop rolling with traumas, recriminations, and self-doubts that have tormented them for decades.