Irish Times review for NATASHA
READ HERE – Irishtimes.com — https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2025/06/25/natasha-review-moving-insight-into-brutal-personal-experience-that-became-a-national-lightning-rod/
Excerpt:
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. ..continue