A student’s search for her birth mother has haunting results in this tale from the innovative Irish directing team of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor
“Who are you?” That’s a question that rings throughout the work of Dublin-born film-making duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor. Through a series of mesmerising features, shorts and video projects, the pair have explored ideas of history and duality in ways that are simultaneously baffling and unsettling, playful yet profound. In Rose Plays Julie, which feels like a ghostly horror-tinged companion piece to 2008’s brilliant Helen, they once again address the concept of past and present coexisting through the medium of role-playing, conjuring a deceptively slick psychological drama (it’s their most accessible feature to date) while retaining the austere sense of distance and performance that has defined their intriguing oeuvre.
Ann Skelly is Rose, a veterinary science student who was adopted as a baby and who has recently discovered the identity of her birth mother, an actor named Ellen (Orla Brady) who, as fate would have it, once played a vet. Despite a firm request for no contact, Rose travels from Dublin to London to confront her mother, whose well-to-do domestic life includes a beloved teenage daughter, Eva (Sadie Soverall). Posing at first as a prospective buyer for Ellen’s house, Rose infiltrates her mother’s home, observing its showcase interiors with the air of an outcast doppelganger, marvelling at the life she never had.