‘Lollipop’: Edinburgh Review

Dir/scr. Daisy-May Hudson. UK. 2024. 100mins.

After four months in prison for an unspecified crime, Molly (Posy Sterling) is ready to get on with her life. But, as this powerful slice of social realist cinema from first-time feature director Daisy-May Hudson makes clear, it’s not as simple as just picking up where she left off – she lost her home when she went to jail, and lost her children into the care system shortly afterwards. Superbly acted and simmering with righteous anger, the film is likely to draw comparisons to Ken Loach, with particular parallels to the plight of the struggling mum-below-the-breadline in I, Daniel Blake. But while the story might feel somewhat familiar – Paddy Breathnach’s Rosie is another thematic touchstone – Hudson brings a stinging authenticity that is drawn from her own personal experience.

Hudson brings a stinging authenticity that is drawn from her own personal experience

Hudson’s route into filmmaking came when she, along with her mother and younger sister, found themselves homeless. Hudson recorded the experience for a year to make the Bifa and Grierson-nominated feature documentary Half Way. Lollipop captures the formidable feat of clawing a life back from the brink of disaster, but it’s no miserablist slog. Rather it’s an endorsement of the real things that make a home, whether or not there’s a roof on it: love, friendship, joy, song and celebration.  

Molly is a tightly wound young woman whose surging emotions run close to her skin. It’s a gift of a role for Sterling (a former Screen Star Of Tomorrow), who reveals the layers of fear and anguish snaking behind the bright smile that Molly shows to the world. She puffs her cheeks out in moments of stress, a pressure cooker about to blow. What’s never in question is her fierce love for her children, Ava (Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads) and preschooler and aspiring tap-dancer Leo (Luke Howitt), the only male character in this female-driven story.

Molly may be living in a tent on some wasteland – the location isn’t specified, although the accents and a prominantly displayed West Ham jersey pin the story to East London’s fringes – but she can’t accept that the children might be better off waiting until she has a bit more stability before they join her. Molly has a tendency to act impulsively and recklessly. When her supervised playdate with the children in a sour-spirited, litter-strewn playground is curtailed, she begs for a little extra time and then does a bunk with the kids, hauling them onto a coach to a new town. She pitches her tent on a sweeping hill surrounded by nature, and shares a few blissful days with her children, daring to hope that she can start anew.

Predictably, her actions set back her case with the authorities. With a cycle of bureaucracy placing barrier after barrier in her way, it’s not until Molly reconnects with her former college best friend Amina (Idil Ahmed), herself a single mother in a homeless shelter, that she finds the strength to turn her life around. She also needs to find a way to navigate her extremely rocky relationship with her mother Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins, excellent), who manages to be simultaneously neglectful and overbearing. 

The scenes in which Molly and her mother circle each other like fighters in a ring are bracing, but the heart of the picture comes in the moments that Molly shares with Amina. There’s a wrenching sequence in which Molly breaks down in the office of the local social services and Amina quietly holds her as she sobs on the floor; soon after, another scene provides the flipside – the two friends dance together, reconnecting with the giddy optimism of their college days and daring to hope of better times ahead. 

Throughout it all, music is central, with James William Blades’s score a driving force in the story, but the diegetic tracks – accompanying a family karaoke bout and that bedroom dancing – provide the hints that Molly might finally get to sing her own song once more.