Rosie: Gripping Irish Drama Explores Homelessness From a Mother’s Perspective

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

“I’m looking for a room for a few nights. There’s six of us.”

Those two sentences echo like a refrain throughout Rosie, a modest but hard-hitting drama about a young Dublin mother trying to find temporary accommodation for the night after being evicted, two weeks earlier, when her landlord sold her home. Six of us — by comparison Mary and Joseph, had a cakewalk.

The script for Rosie was written by Roddy Doyle, the novelist and screenwriter (The Commitments, The Van) as a portrait of working-class Dublin family life. There’s little comic relief in Rosie as we watch the title character, a resilient working-class mother (an excellent Sarah Greene) over a 36-hour period as she struggles to find a safe place for her newly homeless family to sleep.

There’s an anxious circling-the-drain quality to this drama that follows a family who have, in effect, become refugees in their own country. The film opens with a radio report about Ireland’s rental housing crisis, which has produced the highest percentage of homeless families in Europe. The focus moves quickly from the general to the specific.

Rosie and her partner, John Paul (Moe Dunford), and their four children are looking for a place to sleep. John Paul works as a restaurant dishwasher while Rosie looks for shelter from a list of inexpensive government-approved hotels. At one point, Rosie learns that all the hotels in Dublin are booked solid because of a Lady Gaga concert. “Lady Gaga,” she says wonderingly. “She’s brilliant.” Repeatedly, she winds up fruitless phone conversations by saying “Sorry.”

We follow her, cell phone in hand and behind the wheel of her car, as she calls a list of phone numbers with a credit card from “the Council” looking for temporary accommodation. Repeatedly she makes the calls, finds no one prepared to take in six people, and calls again.

In between, she struggles to keep the kids —13-year-old Kayleigh (Ellie O'Halloran) eight-year-old Millie (Ruby Dunne), six-year-old Alfie (Darragh McKenzie) and four-year-old Madison (Molly McCann) — fed, cleanish, and delivered to school, while carrying their clothes in garbage bags in the car’s trunk. The tight-lipped Millie, she discovers, is being bullied at school. Kayleigh, the oldest, tries to find temporary digs with a schoolmate’s family. And, of course, there is the constant need for bathroom breaks for the four-year-old.

Director Paddy Breathnach keeps us inside the car, with hand-held camera work that conveys the stress, bordering on panic, of Rosie’s situation. One can’t help be reminded of similar films: The Dardenne brothers similarly titled Rosetta, among a teen in a Belgian trailer camp trying to find work, or Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, about a man with a heart condition trying to negotiate his way through the welfare bureaucracy.

In this otherwise naturalistic drama, there is one subplot (where Rosie visits her estranged mother) that puts its thumb on the dramatic scales. Otherwise, we’re gripped by the tension of Greene’s tautly calibrated performance, as a mother performing a daily high-wire act, trying to keep her family together and her children from harm.

Rosie. Directed by Paddy Breathnach. Written by Roddy Doyle. Starring Sarah Greene, Moe Dunford, Ellie O'Halloran, Ruby Dunne, Darragh Mckenzie. Opens January 31 at Toronto’s Carlton Theatre and VOD April 2020.