Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday October 05th, 2025
Not as good as the Wikipedia page
It's a bit unfair to watch this straight after the magnificent Relay, but there you go. This is the story behind the biggest art theft in Irish history, spearheaded by Rose Dugdale, an English woman from an incredibly wealthy background, for the cause of the IRA.
The first mistake the film makes is by spending so much of it's runtime on the heist itself. Stealing stuff is the easy part, the boring part. Anyone can steal something, the trick is to get away with it. Relay doesn't even bother to show the theft, it's already happened before the film even starts.
The problem here is that the main characters don't seem to realise this and their getaway plan is staggeringly dumb, full of holes and badly implemented. It's difficult to empathise with them when they keep making schoolboy errors that we can see coming a mile off.
Which leads to the second mistake the film makes which is to focus on the art theft in the first place. A quick read through Rose Dugdale's Wikipedia entry is jaw dropping. She led a truly extraordinary life which the film shows snapshots of but never enough to show how committed she truly was. You could come away from this film with the idea that she was something of a dilettante, where as I think the the lack of commitment is from the film makers, not Rose.
The film has a lot of interesting ideas and tries to knit everything together in an attempt to create something that's more than the sum of it's parts. The way it uses the artworks themselves to explore aspects of Rose's characters is a good idea. Unfortunately it doesn't use the rest of the script to really dig deep and so everything is little more than a scratch on the surface.
Which is a shame as if anyone's life is interesting enough to make a movie of, it's Rose Dugdale. It's just a shame that this one doesn't do it justice.
