It is always a welcome surprise to come across a film that somehow slipped under my radar but proves to be a completely absorbing and thought provoking experience. Rose Plays Julie (2019) from the filmmaking team of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy might be a small scale independent film from Ireland but it is much more immersive and emotionally complex than just about any contemporary movie I’ve seen from a major Hollywood studio. It draws you in almost immediately with its depiction of Rose (Ann Skelly), a young veterinarian student, who is conducting her own private investigation into her birth origins. Although she was adopted at an early age, Rose is now determined to track down her birth mother Ellen (Orla Brady), even though the latter wanted to remain anonymous after giving birth, severing all future contact with her daughter. What begins as a psychological drama about a young woman with identity issues slowly transitions into a mystery thriller before veering off into something much more shocking and unexpected.
It is hard to talk about Rose Plays Julie without spoiling the surprising twists and turns of the narrative so I will refrain from revealing too much other than to mention a few important plot points. For instance, Rose assumes a new identity as Julie and even alters her appearance as she begins to stalk Ellen in the hopes of confronting her about the past and learning the identity of her birth father. He turns out to a well known archeologist named Peter (Aidan Gillen) who is famous for his best-selling book Below the Surface (which might be a more revealing title for the movie). Pretending to be a filmmaker, Ellen visits Peter on his recent dig in the Irish countryside and convinces him to let her observe his excavation in progress as invaluable research for her upcoming movie. Rose’s true motives are eventually revealed to both Ellen and Peter but the affect it has on both of them is devastating.
Rose Plays Julie is the fourth collaboration between Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy; their previous work includes Helen (2008), a drama about a working class teenager, Mister John (2013) starring Aidan Gillen as a man investigating his brother’s mysterious death in Singapore, and Further Beyond (2018), a documentary about Ambrosio O’Higgins, an Irish-Spanish general who ruled Chile from 1788-1996. Rose Plays Julie is a remarkably self-assured work that has brought them much wider exposure than any previous work. For one thing, the pacing is deliberate and exacting and completely in lockstep with the film’s stylized visual look, which is chilly, foreboding and mysterious (The lush, dark-toned cinematography is by Tom Comerford and Stephen McKeon composed the portentious music score). The performances are also exceptionally strong with Ann Skelly making a memorably spooky impression as the enigmatic Rose. Although she occasionally reveals her inner thoughts through voiceover narration, the viewer can never be sure if what she is telling us is the truth or is she simply playing the part of the fictitious Julie she has created?
Equally impressive is Orla Brady as the anxious, emotionally embattled Ellen and Aidan Gillen as the deceptively charming but devious Peter. Brady skillfully navigates a tricky character arc that has her trying to forget her traumatic past only to end up embracing it with a quiet controlled fury. I had not seen this Dublin-based actress before but she has been working steadily in film and television since 1991 and has recently appeared in such popular TV series as American Horror Story (2019) and Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023).
Gillen, who has made a career out of playing complicated villains, either by design or by typecasting, should be familiar to most viewers. He was the slippery politician Tommy Carcetti in the cable series The Wire and the treacherous Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in HBO’s Game of Thrones. He has also popped up as a cop killer in Blitz (2011), the controversial manager of the rock band Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), a pyromaniac and murderer threatening Angelina Jolie in Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021), and a drug czar in Amongst the Wolves (2024). In Rose Plays Julie, Gillen is a man who wears many masks, most of which fool his colleagues and the public. His true nature, however, is that of a compulsive sexual predator and Gillen manages to make him both loathsome and pitiable.
When Rose Plays Julie was first released, some female critics pegged it as a gender issue movie influenced by the Me Too movement but the directors have denied that label. Still, the movie might be more timely now than ever since it addresses how men in positions of power can get away with sexual abuse. In an interview with Philip Concannon of The Skinny, co-director Molloy stated, “Cinema is full of dead female bodies…They die in all kinds of ways. I mean, I know that cinema is also full of dead male bodies – you look at westerns and war films – but they’re often heroic and full of machismo and courage, whereas women are dismantled and destroyed. If nothing else, we were not going to have a woman dying in our film in a brutal and violent way, and for that to be the reveal or the other twist in the narrative, and we also knew that we wouldn’t have rape depicted on screen because cinema’s also full of rape. Not in Rose Plays Julie, anyway. I’m just not interested.” Co-director Lawlor also added that part of the filmmaking team’s objective with Rose Plays Julie was to explore the psychological ramifications of trauma and how it can be handed down to the next generation. But the film is not some belabored message movie but a riveting character study that keeps you guessing throughout its 100-minute running time while refusing to conform to formulaic conventions.
Jessica Kiang of Variety noted that “Beneath the eerily calm surfaces of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s terrific “Rose Plays Julie,” a transgressive story bides its time. It’s a tale that feels ancient in structure, but terrifyingly modern in detail…The most disturbing thing about the impressively disturbing “Rose Plays Julie” may just be how satisfying it is.” And Sarah-Tai Black of The Los Angeles Times wrote [the film] “is able to shape its story with an urgent intensity that feels neither overbearing nor contrived…A deeply aware film, “Rose Plays Julie” allows for the fantastic as a means and space of catharsis… As written and directed by the filmmaking team of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, the movie has a remarkably precise, controlled and composed look that utterly belies (and yet, in its odd way, begins to add to) the tale’s creepy and increasingly fraught story line.
Although it had a limited 2021 theatrical release in the U.S. two years after its original premiere in the U.K., Rose Plays Julie may eventually find a larger audience through positive word of mouth now that is available on streaming platforms like Tubi, Roku and Amazon Prime. The movie is also available on DVD from Film Movement and online sellers. Meanwhile, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have completed two other movies since Rose Plays Julie – the 2022 documentary The Future Tense and Rose’s War aka Baltimore (2023) starring Imogen Poots as an English heiress turned IRA activist.
Other links of interest:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/rose-plays-julie-movie-review-2021
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/rose-plays-julie-mythic-thriller-about-women-violence
https://filmmovement.com/rose-plays-julie
Cinema Sojourns 