Joyride: Olivia Colman’s Irish Road Movie Offers Outsize Charm

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A

Even with the relative star power of Olivia Colman attached to its name, Joyride is the kind of low-key, understated film that could be easily overlooked in a sea of streaming options with fatter advertising budgets and flashier, CGI-enhanced plots.

That would be a shame as Joyride is terrific, a storytelling and acting gem bursting with heart yet never saccharine.

Part road movie, part coming-of-age tale, part rumination on the myriad harms parents inflict on their children — and shot through with black humour foundational to so many Irish films — Joyride opens in a pub where young Mully (newcomer Charlie Reid) and his da James (Lochlann Ó Mearáin) are hosting a hospice fundraiser for mother and wife Rita, a cancer victim.

Amid the hubbub, 13-year-old Mully sees James snatch the donated money and exit the pub. He confronts him outside, where James says Rita would want him to have the money. “What’s for her is for us. You, me, your sister, the baby. It’s not cheap having a new one in the house.” James peels €50 from the wad and offers it to Mully as shut-up money.

Mully takes the note, then grabs the stolen funds and runs, hopping into the vacant driver’s seat of a waiting taxi. He flees but soon realizes he has unexpected passengers tucked in the back seat: sleeping Joy (Colman) and her tiny, as-yet-unnamed newborn.

Joy is a no-nonsense lawyer with a mission: to offload the baby to an ostensibly better-fit carer. Realizing the precariousness of Mully’s position — and her own, not to mention Mully’s preternatural way with infants — Joy hatches a plan to corral the boy as an accomplice.

As this unlikely duo wind their way through the Irish countryside, their stories unfold. Joy’s baby was unplanned, the father is unknown, and she feels woefully unequipped to raise a child. Mully, grieving his mother and too smart for his small town by half, must pacify his slimeball, in-pursuit father while figuring out how to return the money.

As the pair bounce along, a necessary but exalting dependence emerges. It’s a challenging relationship, one where roles frequently reverse, perhaps most astonishingly with Mully teaching Joy how to nurse baby Robin, a trick he learned at home. Stuff happens. It turns out Joy knew Mully’s mom Rita. A fox gets run over. An emotionally awful incident in Joy’s young life, meanwhile, put her eagerness to lose the baby into a softer perspective.

Director Emer Reynolds, working from screenplay by Ailbhe Keogan, builds chemistry between Mully and Joy through an escalating series of incidents, some frightening, some sad, others absurd, all entertaining as the two hurtle towards the final act with its unpredictable climax but winning resolution.

There are no Shyamalan twists in Joyride, nothing wildly out of the ordinary or requiring some grand suspension of disbelief. It’s a story about temporarily lost souls finding their way, delivered by talented actors doing very good work.

Maybe it’s just me, but every Colman performance prompts tiny tingles in the hope that she might win another Oscar and deliver another fantastically ad-hoc and memorable Oscar speech. Doubtful to happen here, alas, but Joyride — title very much tongue-in-cheek, or maybe a play on words — is nevertheless highly recommended.

It’s hard to remember a wintery Saturday night spent as charmingly as the one I spent with this film. Trust me, and watch it.

Joyride. Directed by Emer Reynolds. Starring Olivia Colman, Charlie Reid, and Lochlann Ó Mearáin. Available for streaming February 28 on iTunes, Cineplex Store, Google Play, Microsoft, Amazon, Telus, Bell, Shaw, and Rogers.