Baltimore film review — mesmerising tale of heiress turned terrorist with Imogen Poots

By a strange coincidence, the subject of Baltimore died earlier this week, aged 82. She was Rose Dugdale, an English heiress who rejected her pampered background to become a militant with the Provisional IRA. In 1974, she masterminded the theft of 19 important paintings from Russborough House in County Wicklow; that episode is at the centre of this troubling, elusive film by Irish duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.

Named after a village in County Cork, Baltimore is anything but a straight biopic, although key moments of Dugdale’s life are dropped into the action in what seem like deliberately conventional flashbacks: her horror, aged 10, at being blooded at the killing of a fox; her feminist protest in male drag at the Oxford Union.

The rest, however, is not remotely conventional. Much of the action shows Dugdale (Imogen Poots) and two IRA accomplices as they carry out their robbery, to the terror of the stately home’s two elderly owners, with Dugdale pausing to wax philosophical to a young boy about the paintings. Slipping backwards and forwards in time, the fragmented narrative similarly slips between versions of its protagonist — who does not seem entirely able to keep tabs on her own identity. During the raid, she adopts a French accent, but forgetfully drops it while in full flow about Vermeer.

Terrorising the lady of the house, Dugdale delivers an enraged sermon on British arrogance — as if entirely forgetting her own origins and blind to her own resulting entitlement. It is surely her sense of upper-class superiority (Dugdale was a former debutante) that gives this privileged outsider the self-assurance to assume command of an IRA operation, to the bemusement and scepticism of her two accomplices (played by Lewis Brophy and a wryly hangdog Tom Vaughan-Lawlor).

The film has already been attacked for glorifying Dugdale — not accurately, although the casting of Poots undeniably makes for a certain amplified glamour — and for downplaying the violence she was involved in. In reality, Baltimore shows that people had good reason to fear her — notably, an elderly countryside dweller (Dermot Crowley), who begins to have doubts about his mysterious new neighbour.

The film, empathetic as it is, highlights at once the intensity of Dugdale’s convictions and the complex instability of her self — a consistent theme in the fiction films of Molloy and Lawlor (Helen; Rose Plays Julie), which have often mused on performance and the mysteries of identity, inherited, adopted or assumed.

Poots plays Dugdale as sometimes skittish, sometimes scarily intense, yet also often calmly withdrawn, her shifting moods a wall of subtly unfathomable defence.

Shot by Tom Comerford, Baltimore is mesmerisingly styled, with its meticulous compositions, ominous creeping camera moves and disorienting shifts of rhythm. With Stephen McKeon contributing a score of rippling eeriness, a dreamlike unease persists to the end. The film may leave us no wiser about who Dugdale was and how she became who she did — but it also tantalisingly makes us wonder whether she herself knew.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from March 22