Film Review: Vicky is a hard-hitting account of a latter-day warrior queen

Vicky the film is intimately rooted in Vicky Phelan's day-to-day family life and incorporates the stories of some of her fellow victims

Vicky Phelan the award-winning documentary VICKY, only in cinemas October 7. Portrait by Conor Merriman.

Vicky

★★★★★

Stock up on tissues and placards. Sasha King’s film Vicky (15A) begins with the heart-breaking sight of Vicky Phelan, who has only a few months left to live, telling us where she wants her ashes to be scattered. 

But don’t be fooled by the poignant tone of the opening: this is a hard-hitting, blood-boiling account of an unwilling heroine who brought to light Ireland’s cervical cancer debacle.

Intimately rooted in Vicky’s day-to-day family life, and incorporating the stories of some of her fellow victims, this is the very definition of ‘the personal is the political’. 

There’s a Kafkaesque quality to Vicky’s attempts to source life-saving treatment whilst navigating the labyrinthine legal system, which results in a deeply moving account combining Vicky’s battle to ‘take back control’ of her life with a devastating exposé of not just a medical but a political scandal (the point is well made here that the cervical smear scandal is only one of a number of recent Irish health scandals somehow seeming to affect only women).

A pragmatic, self-deprecating and down-to-earth woman, Vicky Phelan is a latter-day warrior queen who spoke her unflinching truth to power, and Vicky is her testament.

(cinema release)