Fleapit revisited:Herself.

"You're building a home for your children. You're working day and night to give them a childhood they've been denied, and then every weekend you have to drop them home to that fucker" - Peggy

Abusive husbands, absent fathers, toxic relationships. The more life you live the more you see these things as they really are. Men, often raised in a atmosphere of violence, passing that violence on to the next generation and most of all taking their insecurities out on their wives and partners. Quite often with their fists or their boots.

Phyllida's Lloyd new film, Herself, uses a relationship like that, one between Sandra (Clare Dunne - co-writer, along with Malcolm Campbell, of the script) and Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson) as its starting point but soon it moves on to the story of Sandra, and a selection of friends and general well wishers and kindly people, building a home for her and her kids, Emma (Ruby Rose O'Hara) and Molly (Molly McCann) in the large Dublin back garden of the lady she cleans for, Peggy.

Peggy (Harriet Walter) becomes as much friend and confidante as she does employer to Sandra. Even, as the opening line of this review attests, something of a confidence builder. Despite suffering her own physical woes. Assistance in the construction project also comes from friendly builder Aido (Conleth Hill), his son Francis (Daniel Ryan), Yewande (Mabel Chah), Dariusz (Dmitry Vinokourov), Tomo (Aaron Lockhart), and even, after a fashion, Peggy's initially sceptical daughter Grainne (Rebecca O'Mara).

What these friends share, and what was lacking in Sandra's relationship with Gary, is trust and respect. There is kindness and humour in almost every exchange and when things are fraught, as they often are, and tempers are short, amends are soon made. When Aido appoints Emma and Molly as the project managers and tells them that 'Command and Control' should never need to be on the building site he wins their confidence and affection at the same time as looking after their health and safety.

When Sandra brings cans of lager in for the workers after a hard day's graft, when Yewanda cooks them all a Cameroonian goat stew, much to the team clown Tomo's astonishment, and when they all gather to sing and dance to jigs and reels together the moments are rendered so touchingly and realistically they can't but help bring a lump to the throat.

But Herself is not shy of reminding the viewer that escaping an abusive partner is not as easy as simply moving house. Sandra is haunted by flashbacks of kitchen beatings and when, while it's his turn to have the kids for the weekend, Gary tells her he's changed and that he's undergoing counselling you're not sure if he's telling the truth, trying to win her back or both.

Possibly so he can dish out more of the same. The fact he's never seen apologising for his actions should be enough to set alarm bells ringing but when he has the audacity to take Sandra to court for breaching the agreed access conditions (little Molly was hiding in a cupboard having wet herself, scared of seeing her own father) you can barely believe the audacity of the man.

Except, life has taught me, you can. Only too easily. The thing with these men is that when they can no longer control their partner from within the privacy of their own four walls they will try to control them remotely. Either through the use of courts and by exploiting legal loopholes or by spreading rumours and disinformation about them. If you can make your accuser, your victim, look like an unreliable witness then you can, in some small way, hope to redeem yourself.

It rarely works. But it sometimes does. The thrust of the drama in Herself is not just will Sandra and her friends succeed in building their house but will that house, and those inside it, be safe from Gary. The fact you are never certain right up to the very final moment how that will pan out is testament to a wonderful ensemble cast (most of the credit must go to Dunne who is rarely off the screen but it would be remiss of me not to mention Lloyd Anderson's performance as a man whose simmering menace is so much part of his persona that he can barely understand it himself, as well as giving credit to the two little girls, O'Hara and McCann, who while being utterly adorable also give us a terrifying insight into the damage that this kind of abuse can do to children) and great direction from Lloyd.

In some ways, Herself may have jarred. Jumping, as it did, from idyllic house building montages to flashbacks of violent assaults but, to me, that was the point, and strength, of the film. The physical damage Gary has done to Sandra will, hopefully, heal one day. The mental damage, we're not allowed to forget, will take a lot longer.