This uncanny and transgressive film about a young woman who tracks down her birth parents is Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s best work yet
Writer-directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have returned to the
London film festival with their best work yet. At one level, it’s another eerie and uncanny movie shot with cool blankness and emotional distance; a meditation on the themes they have already explored in earlier movies such as Helen (2008) and Mister John (2013): ideas about double lives, impersonations, alternative existences and identities. But Rose Plays Julie has much more dramatic solidity and punch. Whereas some of their earlier work, however intriguing, sometimes looked like melting away into the mist, this film grabs you by the throat.
The drama begins by seeming to be hardly more than a poignant evocation of loneliness and regret. Then it escalates into an edge-of-the-seat suspense thriller of the sort that Chabrol might have admired, or even something written by Joe Eszterhas that you could have rented on VHS some time in the 80s. Yet even Eszterhas might have have flinched at the pure transgression of what is being implied. And by the end, it’s got something very real to say about #MeToo issues. There is scope for disagreement about the final balance of thriller and real-world drama, and some unresolved plot-plausibility implications, but there is no doubt about the chillingly accumulated potency and force of this movie, or the quality of the performances.