Rose Plays Julie

In life, there are pro­fes­sions avail­able to those who seek them which enable you to admin­is­ter a lethal injec­tion to a live ani­mal. You prep the nee­dle. You deliv­er the poison.

Then you stand back and watch the ani­mal die. Rose Plays Julie, the extra­or­di­nary new reflex­ive dra­ma by Irish film­mak­ers Joe Lawlor and Chris­tine Mol­loy, presents a young woman named Rose (Ann Skel­ly) in the process of becom­ing a vet­eri­nar­i­an, and such a life-or-death pro­ce­dure is vital to the learn­ing process. It’s not just the tech­ni­cal aspects, but the emo­tion­al side: being able to cold­ly and calm­ly accept that death is the only humane course of action.

The busi­ness of putting lame ani­mals to sleep is water off a (dead) duck’s back for Rose, but there’s the sug­ges­tion that her prospec­tive occu­pa­tion has trig­gered a desire to set her own affairs in order. Rose dis­cov­ers she was adopt­ed, and wants to know who her real par­ents are. She heads to Lon­don and clev­er­ly ensnares a pop­u­lar TV actor named Ellen (Orla Brady) into reveal­ing the details of her birth, which in turn sheds light on why Rose was put up for adop­tion in the first place by this suc­cess­ful pro­fes­sion­al who, it tran­spires, went on to have oth­er children.

The sto­ry of her pro­cre­ation is beyond her dark­est dreams, and Ellen is forced to exca­vate the bible-black mem­o­ries of her deep­est soul in order to give Rose the truth she so deserves. The sequence is gen­uine­ly har­row­ing, as well as being har­row­ing­ly gen­uine, in that it reflects the dif­fi­cul­ty that comes with unload­ing repressed trau­mas that place pop­u­lar men in the crosshairs.

The pop­u­lar man in this instance is Aiden Gillen’s Peter, who does his own form of exca­va­tion as a squeaky clean TV archae­ol­o­gist. But like Ellen, there’s a stark dis­par­i­ty between the per­son he presents on cam­era and the per­sona he presents off it. In some ways, Rose Plays Julie is stealth­ily crit­i­cal of the screen’s abil­i­ty to allow evil peo­ple to hide from reality.

Yet it also sug­gests that per­for­mance can allow a per­son to be any­one they want to be. Ellen’s trau­ma is trans­ferred to Rose and exac­er­bat­ed by the added ele­ment of sur­prise, and so the daugh­ter decides to invent her own ​“char­ac­ter” named Julie and, as she did with her moth­er, infil­trate the life of her estranged father and probe for ways to make him con­front the pain he caused her mother.

What’s great about Rose Plays Julie is that it works as a kind of trashy and glee­ful­ly con­trived revenge thriller, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its more tense sec­ond half. But every deci­sion and every moment is loaded with com­plex eth­i­cal dilem­mas and dif­fi­cult ques­tions about how we go about lay­ing our per­son­al demons to rest. We can’t just give them a lethal injec­tion and stand and watch as they expire. Or can we?