‘Baltimore’ Review: Imogen Poots’ Resolute Fury Fuels a Portrait of a Real-Life Heiress Turned Revolutionary

Baltimore — whose title refers to a village in County Cork, Ireland — begins in the midst of a heist, but it’s not a heist film. And its starting point is not just any heist but the largest art theft in history, pulled off by four IRA members led by a onetime debutante, Rose Dugdale. She’s the focus of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s concise and intimate film, and she’s played with a compelling mix of ferocity, focus and conscience by Imogen Poots.

As a few incisive flashbacks reveal, Rose grew up in immense wealth but never quite bought into the entitlement and expectations. At age 10, on her first fox hunt, her sympathies lie with the fox. On a museum visit, the teenage Rose baffles her mother when she’s moved by a painting’s focus on a Black woman; Mum sees a piece of pottery as the most interesting element of the canvas. Rose’s parents (Carrie Crowley and Simon Coury) are baffled by her political anger, no more so than when she robs them in a “fundraising” effort for the IRA, joined by her lover at the time (Patrick Martins).

There’s theater as well as anger in her political actions, beginning perhaps with the gotcha demonstration she and a friend pull off as students at Oxford, in drag, to protest sexual discrimination at the school. For the 1974 art burglary at the center of the movie, ringleader Rose dons a red wig and deploys an almost comical French accent. The heist itself, at the private estate Russborough House, in Ireland’s County Wicklow, doesn’t go entirely without problems, but still it nets 19 of the world’s most priceless paintings, a Rubens and a Vermeer among them. The goal is to exchange them for the release from English prisons of four IRA prisoners.

Having “liberated the paintings from the capitalist pigs,” Rose and two of her comrades, as they call one another, hole up in a rented house in the countryside while the fourth member of the group, Rose’s partner, Eddie (Jack Meade), waits for them in a safe house in Baltimore, about 15 miles away. Martin (Lewis Brophy), the youngest of the quartet, has a hair-trigger tendency toward violence. The oldest, Dominic (the subtle and excellent Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), is a philosophical man of action who spent time in a seminary. Together they tend to Rose’s hand, badly injured during the heist, and help her craft the demands she’ll deliver to the authorities via the public phone of the nosy shopkeeper (Fionnuala Murphy).

Molloy and Lawlor intercut scenes of Rose’s involvement in a North London squat in the early ’70s, sequences that show her devotion to the cause of Irish reunification, her profound anger over U.K. policy, and her know-how when it comes to assembling explosives. Actual news footage, sparingly used, offers glimpses of the police violence faced by protesters (Bloody Sunday, in Northern Ireland, took place in 1972).

A graduate of Oxford and Mount Holyoke, Rose can talk admiringly about the stolen paintings to an inquisitive Martin, and she offers rather conventional advice to a little boy (Flynn Gray) she encounters. A few dream sequences give rather obvious form to her inner conflict, in one instance through a confrontation with the titled art collectors of Russborough House (Andrea Irvine and Jim Kavanagh) — proxies, in a way, for her parents. There are ruthless dreams, too, involving plans that Rose makes in the light of day but perhaps isn’t as ready to carry out as she believes she is.

The emotional underpinnings and conflicts in Rose’s story are explored in far more affecting ways during a few conversations in her waking hours. Poots brings a slow-burn sense of searching and honesty to these interactions, first with the sad-eyed Dominic, who figures out that she’s pregnant — something she hasn’t yet told Eddie. Rose’s exchanges with Donal (a standout Dermot Crowley), an older neighbor whose suspicions she might have aroused, are especially moving, their give-and-take charged with uncertainty and second-guessing, but also a certain communion.

Stephen McKeon’s score, percussive, churning and sometimes thunderous, heightens the feelings of determination and apprehension that course through the movie’s events, and cinematographer Tom Comerford uses split screens at key junctures to underscore the intense logistical considerations of Rose’s mission. Poots’ performance is fully alive to that intensity, to the nerves and decisiveness of someone who’s hell-bent on justice, uncertain about motherhood, and always putting on a performance when she’s not among her comrades — who’s not what she seems, as she describes the subject of one of the prized paintings she’s holding hostage. Baltimore doesn’t presume to ask you to root for her, but it invites you to understand what drives her.