Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor are artists and film-makers from Ireland who have created eerie and suspenseful psychological dramas in parallel with a strand of complex and self-questioning essay movies. They explore ideas about history and identity, ruminating on their creative selves and metatextually examining (or re-examining) their own work. You may call it the “Alfred Hitchcock” and “Chris Marker” sides to their work. Sometimes, their documentaries act as a kind of commentary on the fiction feature they are developing at the same time: like The Future Tense, a film about the ideas encountered during a planned movie about the pro-IRA English heiress Rose Dugdale, a project which came to fruition as the drama Baltimore .
Now, they have made a strangely mesmeric, deeply personal, mysteriously stylised film called Act 3, which may itself yet herald a conventional drama about its notional subject. It is structured around Molloy and Lawlor having a weirdly self-aware dialogue about their lives together over 40 years, filmed singly in shot-reverse-shot (was each holding the camera on the other?) but speaking quietly and slowly, as if under hypnosis.
Related: The Future Tense review – film-makers’ complex reverie of English and Irish identities
They are talking about their planned film about Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, the 20th-century French artist couple who might now be called genderqueer; they styled themselves with the masculine-sounding names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and were lovers who became stepsisters when their parents married. They lived in an attic room in Nantes, which the film psychogeographically reveals is now screen 12 of the city’s Pathé cinema; they frequented Parisian surrealist salons in the 1930s and were arrested for anti-Nazi activism in 1944 in occupied Jersey, but were spared execution due to the liberation.
It seems Lawlor and Molloy’s movie about them is having money troubles because funding bodies are worried about a problem with its third act. And yes, as the two artists survived the war and lived on uneventfully in Jersey, perhaps that does seem anticlimactic. The film-makers use this as a springboard to muse on their own “third act”; they are in their 60s, in the final stage of their lives. They talk about their young selves, their wedding in their early 20s and about Joe’s brother John, who lives in Thailand with his partner. (They visit John again as a family, and their digital video material is juxtaposed with the milky analogue footage they took at the time.)
They had a deeply disturbing experience in south-east Asia, seeing a corpse drifting down a river; a trauma they processed into the movie Mister John , with Aidan Gillen as a man who travels to Thailand for his late brother’s funeral, and finds himself drifting into the dead man’s identity. The couple have circled back to this film now because it had meaning and relevance that were not clear to them at the time. It was about death and the eternal repetition of death. Lawlor reflects tenderly on his father’s death from a heart attack, and wonders if the same fate is written in his stars or in his DNA. And, in fact, this film delivers a mighty third-act payoff.
So what does it have to do with the dramatic and heroic artistic lives of Cahun and Moore, whose work is only now being rediscovered? Perhaps nothing in any obvious sense; perhaps the departure, the digression, is the point. Lawlor and Molloy are an artist-couple trying to make a film about another artist-couple, but may have nothing in common with them. Yet bridging or not bridging the gap is where the mystery and artistic energy is to be found. Their film is an austere experience in some ways – and for all that that this is very personal work, the film-makers’ personalities on screen are in fact rather opaque. Yet there is a richness and a maturity in it that is absorbing.
• Act 3 screened at the Telluride film festival.
Now, they have made a strangely mesmeric, deeply personal, mysteriously stylised film called Act 3, which may itself yet herald a conventional drama about its notional subject. It is structured around Molloy and Lawlor having a weirdly self-aware dialogue about their lives together over 40 years, filmed singly in shot-reverse-shot (was each holding the camera on the other?) but speaking quietly and slowly, as if under hypnosis.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Peter Bradshaw. Published 4 Sept 2026, 11:30 pm.
