Film-makers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have a stressed creativity and application to concepts which continues to be uniquely precious. Now they’ve made a vivid, intense, true-crime drama in regards to the inside lifetime of the late Rose Dugdale, the rich English heiress and debutante who was radicalised at Oxford, joined the IRA and within the early 70s was concerned in an artwork theft from a stately residence within the Irish republic – and in addition helped drop do-it-yourself bombs from a stolen helicopter on to a police station.
Baltimore ought to actually be seen in tandem with Lawlor and Molloy’s current private essay movie The Future Tense in regards to the film-makers’ personal complicated sense of evolving identities in Eire and England, impressed by their very own experiences making this Dugdale film. With nice intelligence and care, they benefit from a mid-range funds; a much bigger Hollywood biopic would undoubtedly have given us Rose’s debutante ball at Buckingham Palace and the later weird helicopter assault as two massive set items (maybe with two star names in cameo for the royals within the ball scene). As an alternative, Lawlor and Molloy stage one thing that’s sensible and supple and extra intimate: the heist scene with three different IRA males, with its chaotic and paranoid aftermath, intercut with moments from her personal girlhood, offered as recollections or fragments, equal in dramatic worth to Rose’s nightmares and her terrified sense of what she nonetheless may need to do.
Imogen Poots is great as Dugdale, seen nearly all through in looking out closeup, questioning whether or not she has it in her to execute a potential witness in chilly blood. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Lewis Brophy and Jack Meade are robust as her conspirators and Dermot Crowley is excellent as Donal, a delicate harmless bystander with fading eyesight, studying To Kill a Mockingbird in braille in his cottage as he receives a disturbing go to from Dugdale. A wholly absorbing, coolly low-key film.
