The latest by powerhouse artist-filmmaker duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor picks up a thread from their last film THE FUTURE TENSE, a soulful investigation of Ireland’s tumultuous history. Here, using the form of a heist movie, they tell the true story of Rose Dugdale (played by Imogen Poots), a young heiress who rebelled against her English aristocratic upbringing to volunteer with the Irish Republican Army. In 1974, Dugdale and her collaborators swiped 19 paintings—including Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer—from a private home, using these treasures as leverage for the liberation of four IRA prisoners. Lawlor and Molloy’s highly atmospheric thriller plunges us into the Troubles with heart-stopping intensity, and Poots is riveting as the revolutionary. Beneath her radical facade, we see her fragility and inner turmoil, as she wrestles with appreciation for the beautiful artifacts of a world she has set out to destroy, and the fear of the chaos she has unleashed.
