EIFF 2024: Lollipop
Daisy-May Hudson's drama about a single mother trying to regain access to her kids after a spell in prison can feel a little heavy-handed at times, but an excellent lead performance from Posy Sterling pulls it along
Daisy-May Hudson’s often wrenching but ultimately uplifting drama Lollipop revolves around two women, Mollie (Posy Sterling) and Amina (Idil Ahmed). Friends all through childhood, they haven’t seen each other in years when a chance meeting brings them together at the start of the film. Amina is all warmth and wide smiles while Mollie seems stand-offish. In truth, she’s embarrassed – their meeting found Mollie on her way to see a social worker about regaining custody of her children, having recently been released from prison.
What follows is a story reminiscent of I, Daniel Blake as Mollie tries desperately to navigate a system that seems to have been engineered to crush the life out of all those who enter it. Each new step in the process brings her to another dead end, another interview with an uninterested bureaucrat, another hopeless paradox – she can’t get her kids back until she has a home, but won’t be provided with social housing while she’s still listed as a single woman.
“Keep pushing,” one social worker advises her. “Push where?!” an exasperated, exhausted Mollie replies. It’s an excellent lead performance from Sterling, the camera rarely straying from her as the story puts her character through the wringer.
Lollipop is not a subtle film, and at times it can even be downright ham-fisted. It’s not as richly layered as A.V. Rockwell’s recent take on a similar tale, A Thousand And One. But the moments that do land, land hard.
Lollipop had its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival