Baltimore – first-look review

2023 has gifted us with two great films about the slippery morality behind a form of violent political activism that skirts the bounds of terrorism. The first was Daniel Goldharber’s eco-activist procedural, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the second is Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s Baltimore, a careful and idea-rich portrait of society heiress-turned-IRA-operative, Rose Dugdale.

A fascinating but marginal figure in the story of The Troubles, Dugdale planted her red flag in the annals of history by pulling off the biggest art heist of all time, organised with a view to syphoning the funds made from reselling a stash of paintings to help repatriate a gang of incarcerated IRA members.

Lawlor and Molloy have an abiding interest in disguises, alter-egos and the idea of people transmuting into different versions of themselves. Baltimore offers rich terrain on which these concepts can thrive, not least in the idea that Dugdale was born a British blue blood who, through a series of revelations and the fast-tracking of a radical political consciousness, decoupled from a life of obscene wealth and ritual and became an outspoken warrior for class and gender-based injustices.

As essayed by the great Imogen Poots, Dugdale is presented as a person of almost cut-glass seriousness, where every taciturn aspect of her being is dedicated to serving the political cause at hand. The only respite we get from this coldly-obsessive nature is a series of monologues she delivers to her unborn child, all of which are heartbreakingly coloured by the fact that she may very well be dead or in prison by the times this little person makes it out into the world.

The film opens on the heist itself, with Dugdale and a group of male accomplices descending upon the grand Georgian stack of Russborough House in County Wicklow to terrorise its residents and nab a few pieces by some old masters. Rose’s MO is to use threat rather than violence, though the reception they receive by the entitled, dyed-in-the-wool aristos who live in the building ensures that a little bit of blood is spilled. Later, we move to the dinky getaway cottage where Rose et al hole up to make their negotiations, and it’s there where the recriminations and paranoia begin to fester.

The weight of Dugdale’s moral quandary is emphasised through a soundtrack consisting of eerie orchestral stabs – in fact, there’s no-one in the world who’s using the timpani in a more expressive and chilling fashion than Lawlor and Molloy. The story is captured, too, with a glassy precision which negates any element of sensationalism. The whole episode is presented as somewhat bleak and stifling, and it’s only until very late in the film that we see some physical suggestions that the net is closing in on Rose.

Where the kids in How to Blow Up a Pipeline planned a scheme that was unrealistically (though entertainingly) precise, here, you’re given a sense that Dugdale and her crew are largely winging it through an imprecise scheme with no predictable endgame. Yet as much as Baltimore is a film about the process of such an action, it is also interested in showing how class can be a real mind-fuck when it comes to questions of character and comportment.

It’s a chilling and expertly constructed work which goes on to suggest that our finicky anxieties will end up causing our own tragic downfall. Poots brings fire to her role without just splaying it all on the screen, and she ensures that there’s a hair-trigger intensity to every one of her two-hander conversations throughout the film. It’s also a film about the messiness of life and the inherent unpredictability of people, where the idea of crisp, clean action devoid of emotional connection is simply impossible to achieve.