96 min | NR | September 23, 2022 | Showtime Documentary Films
Sinéad O’Connor shaves her head, tears up a photo of the Pope on live television, and watches an industry decide she is finished. Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary spends five years proving she was right the whole time. The world owed her an apology and mostly sent hate mail instead.
Nothing Compares is a documentary about Sinéad O’Connor and the brief stretch when she becomes one of the most famous musicians on Earth and then the most reviled. Kathryn Ferguson confines the film to the years from 1987 to 1993. That choice is the whole argument. The film treats O’Connor not as a provocateur who self-destructed but as a woman who says true things out loud before the culture is ready to hear them. It is built to vindicate her.
Sinéad O’Connor narrates her own story in voiceover. She describes her mother’s violence and the Catholic institution that holds her as a teenager in flat, unsentimental language. She does not beg for sympathy. Kathleen Hanna speaks as a voice that places O’Connor at the head of a movement that has not yet named itself. John Reynolds recalls the studio years without nostalgia. The film gathers these accounts into a single defense of a woman the public has written off.
Ferguson and co-writers Eleanor Emptage and Michael Mallie make one decisive formal choice. No one appears on camera in the present. Every interview is audio laid over archival footage, so the only faces the film shows belong to the past. The technique keeps O’Connor young and alive on screen while older voices testify from off frame. The editing moves between concert footage, news broadcasts, and home video with a steady rhythm. The sequence built around the torn photograph of Pope John Paul II lets the silence after the act do the work.
The film makes its case and trusts it. By stopping in 1993, Ferguson keeps the focus on the moment of rupture and leaves the harder later chapters offscreen. That discipline gives the documentary its clarity and also its limit. This is advocacy as much as biography, and it never pretends to be neutral. It wants you to see what O’Connor sees and to feel the cost of saying so. The film knows exactly whose side it is on.