n Rose Plays Julie, sexual trauma is hereditary, a curse
passed on by bad men and handed down by injured,
furious women. It is not strictly a horror film, although
much of what transpires is reasonably horrific: cool,
dilatory and clean, the action unfolds like a nightmare.
Rose, a young veterinary college student, goes in search
of her birth-mother, a popular TV actress, and learns that
she was surrendered for adoption because she had been
the product of a rape.
The real name on her birth certificate is “Julie” – an
alias she adopts in order to track down her father, a
ruggedly charismatic archaeologist with an unnerving
air of sexual entitlement. Because Rose is a veterinary
college student, we see her attending lectures about
euthanasia, and watch her injecting animals – a horse, a
dog – with pentobarbital, ensuring that viewers familiar
with certain cinematic tropes might think they know
exactly where the film is headed. To reveal whether or
not this is the case would be unfair. Suffice to say: Rose
did not come here to play.In recent years, the rape-revenge film has enjoyed a
kind of intellectual resurgence, from 2016’s Elle (a dark
rape-comedy whose victim is the real sexual terrorist), to
2017’s Revenge (a rape-revenge pastiche whose heroine
begins the movie as a sugar baby), to 2018’s Holiday (a
rape-revenge where the revenge ends up exacted, cruelly,
on somebody other than the rapist). It would be tempting to
imagine this rebooting of the genre as a reaction to MeToo,
and especially to MeToo’s fallout in Hollywood circles,
if it were not for the fact that most of these films were
conceived before the Weinstein exposé. Writer-directors
Joe Lawlor and Christine Malloy have been trying to bring
Rose Plays Julie to fruition since 2013: “It’s been a long
time brewing,” Malloy says, “for a number of complicated
reasons. That meant that we kind of watched events
around us change and gather momentum, and watched
things like MeToo take off. And we’d been ploughing a
particular furrow for a long time and then, suddenly, the
agenda changed, and made these things even more ripe
for exploration.” “It’s worth noting that on average, it takesI
JOE LAWLOR AND CHRISTINE MOLLOY HAVE MADE A COOL,
CREEPING MODERN TWIST ON THE RAPE-REVENGE MOVIE.
WORDS & INTERVIEW BY PHILIPPA SNOW ILLUSTRATION BY ALICE CARNEGIE TYPE BY LOLO051