Rose Plays Julie looks like a rape-revenge film. Hell, it is a rape-revenge film. I can’t argue that.
But rather than playing as a horror film or a thriller, rather than highlighting the prurient aspects of the genre, Rose Plays Julie is focused on the emotional damage at the heart of the story. And it hurts.
1
Rose is a veterinary student in Dublin. Adopted at a young age, she has always had a yearning to have some sort of relationship with her birth mother, an urge that only heightened when her adopted mother recently passed away. Eventually, Rose discovers that her birth mother is a London actress named Ellen. Rose begins trying to contact Ellen, but it doesn’t go well.
Eventually, Rose follows her to London. There, she learns why Ellen has been distant — and why she gave her up in the first place. As a student, Ellen worked with an archaeologist named Peter Doyle. One night, Peter raped her on a golf course. Ellen never saw him again. She gave birth, gave the child – Julie – up for adoption, and tried to move on with her life.
Rose, however, can’t move on. Now that she knows who her birth father is and what he did, she is just as fixated as she was on her mother. She insinuates herself into his life, pretending to be an actress named ‘Julie’ studying for a role as an archaeologist in a play. She joins him on digs. But she has something deeper planned: She begins to steal drugs used to put down sick animals, filling a syringe, and waiting for the chance to take revenge on Peter.
2
I was particularly intrigued by the film’s… well, not the ending, but the scene that kicks off the ending. In it, Rose’s biological father attempts to sexually assault her, not realizing who she is. Rose fights him off, grievously wounding him before telling him that no means no and that she’s his daughter. Then, something curious happens.
We come back to Peter.
Rose Plays Julie replays snippets of the assault. The point-of-view doesn’t even really change. Peter looks shook, truly and genuinely staggered. A refrain we often hear from rapists is something like: “I wouldn’t do a thing like that. I have daughters/sisters/a mother!” Here, we see someone who has probably never reflected on what he’s done suddenly and violently brought face to face with the assault of his own daughter, an event that crosses enough lines to genuinely shock him into something like remorse.
And then his wife comes home. We see his face close off. His brain, looping the events of the assault, sputters awake. Under questions, Peter finds defenses. The old lies come automatically, effortlessly, to his lips. And just like that, any moment of remorse is gone, buried under his typical justifications. It’s a remarkable sequence, one that shows a man on the verge of understanding opting, instead, to retreat into the comforting emotional framework he’s built up over decades of misogyny.
3
Rose Plays Julie is streaming now on Shudder, and I think this does the film a disservice. I’ve seen rape-revenge films before. From The Last House on the Left and Ms. 45 to attempts to reclaim the subgenre, like Promising Young Woman and Revenge. Even the latter films, while distinct from the type of exploitation origins, are still noticeably using elements of horror films. Rape-revenge is often seen as a horror subgenre.
And those elements are present in Rose Plays Julie, certainly. Anyone familiar with the ‘elevated horror’ of modern A24 releases will recognize the spare aesthetic and powerful loneliness present here. But Rose Plays Julie is pretty definitively not a horror film. Instead, this sad, quiet, reflective film is an earnest and emotional drama about a woman desperately seeking connection and a man destined to shatter it.
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor crafted a moving, disturbing film.