Based on actual events that took place on 26 April 1974, former debutante turned IRA member Rose Dugdale and three comrades carried out an armed raid on Russborough House, Wicklow, in which nineteen masterpieces were stolen in an effort to support the IRA’s armed struggle. The film plays out over the course of the days following the raid, when Rose is in hiding in a remote cottage.
Imogen Poots
Rose Dugdale
Jack Meade
Eddie Gallagher
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor
Dominic
Lewis Brophy
Martin
Dermot Crowley
Donal
John Kavanagh
Sir Alfred Beit
Andrea Irvine
Lady Beit
Flynn Gray
Patrick
Carrie Crowley
Rose's Mother
Simon Coury
Rose's Father
Vanessa Ifediora
Alice
Patrick Martins
Walter
Martha Breen
Sophie
Molly Rose Lawlor
Lizzie
Conor Lambert
Fisherman
Michael-David McKernan
Micheál
Jude McClean
Child Rose
Paul Ward
Butler
Fionnuala Murphy
Shopkeeper
Alan Howley
News Reporter
Ciaran McMahon
Policeman
Simon Kunz
BBC News Reader
Ciaran McKenna
Albert Price
James Edlin
Boy's Father
Ella Cannon
Comrade
Derek Carroll
Garda / Special Branch
Bernadette Carty
Anne
Damien Donnelly
Garda Special Branch (Black Trench Coat)
Kilmurry Jennifer
Oxford Student
James Sadat
Oxford Union Member
Director, Writer
Joe Lawlor
Director, Writer
Christine Molloy
March 26, 2024
6
Compelled to be presented to the Queen as a debutante in return for an Oxford University education, Rose Dugdale (Imogen Poots) rebels from a fairly early age. Her privileged upbringing - as so often happens - leads her to detest the very hands that fed her in her childhood. Meantime, the troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s are only increasing and after a trip to a training camp in Cuba, she returns a fully capable, bomb-making, terrorist - with a brain and a conscience. A plot is devised to rob a stately home of some valuable Goya, Rubens and Vermeer paintings and hold them as hostage for £500,000 and the freedom of two hunger striking IRA prisoners incarcerated in the UK. What now ensues is a rather weekly constructed speculation as to just how this shrewd plan was executed and of the aftermath. The story is an interesting history - but with the timelines dancing around all over the place and the performance of Poots a bit hit or miss, I found the pace of the film too bitty. We are all too often left dangling when a storyline is being developed and talking of development, there is very little to inform us about who the real Dugdale was. The screenplay doesn't shy away from describing the radicalisation here nor of some of it's concomitant brutality but somehow her vitriolic detestation of the British state is left completely unexplained. This subject could make for a strong political documentary on a woman who was clearly dedicated to her cause, but as a drama - this doesn't ever really engage.