Baltimore (2024)

Compelled to be presented to the Queen as a debutante in return for an Oxford University education, Rose Dugdale (Imogen Poots) rebels from a fairly early age. Her privileged upbringing - as so often happens - leads her to detest the very hands that fed her in her childhood. Meantime, the troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s are only increasing and after a trip to a training camp in Cuba, she returns a fully capable, bomb-making, terrorist - with a brain and a conscience. A plot is devised to rob a stately home of some valuable Goya, Rubens and Vermeer paintings and hold them as hostage for £500,000 and the freedom of two hunger striking IRA prisoners incarcerated in the UK. What now ensues is a rather weekly constructed speculation as to just how this shrewd plan was executed and of the aftermath. The story is an interesting history - but with the timelines dancing around all over the place and the performance of Poots a bit hit or miss, I found the pace of the film too bitty. We are all too often left dangling when a storyline is being developed and talking of development, there is very little to inform us about who the real Dugdale was. The screenplay doesn't shy away from describing the radicalisation here nor of some of it's concomitant brutality but somehow her vitriolic detestation of the British state is left completely unexplained. This subject could make for a strong political documentary on a woman who was clearly dedicated to her cause, but as a drama - this doesn't ever really engage.