Lollipop: an emotional rollercoaster through the UK’s Kafka-esque social housing system

Daisy-May Hudson’s Lollipop begins where Ken Loach’s indelible Cathy Come Home (1966) left off: with a homeless single mother and a pair of children in care. Molly (Posy Sterling), known to her mum as Lollipop, has just been released from a four-month stint in prison and is Christmas-Eve-excited to be reunited with her two children, 11-year-old Ava and five-year-old Leo. She skips to the nearest corner shop to charge her phone, looking for all the world like a teenage girl with a crush. But while Molly’s been inside, the children’s grandmother has failed to take care of them, and they have been placed with a foster family. Molly, meanwhile, has lost her flat and her job. She can’t bring her children home, when she has no home to offer them.

Hudson’s first feature takes inspiration from her own upbringing, recounted in her 2015 documentary Half Way. Following her journey, with her mum and younger sister, through the UK’s Kafka-esque social housing system, its relentless frustration was dotted with moments of childish humour and sororal complicity. Molly’s journey is likewise tonally ambivalent, so much so that it’s murky, up until the final ten minutes, whether we’re heading for disaster or redemption. Molly is volatile, reckless, self-sabotaging; constantly breaking her promises to toe the line, much to her daughter’s distress. A chance encounter with childhood friend Amina offers succour, but it’s unclear whether Molly can escape the shadow of her own childhood trauma (“I wish someone had looked after her,” she sighs at a school picture of her younger self).

Sterling, who is in every one of the film’s scenes, is a compelling and empathetic presence, even when Molly’s poor judgement leaves audiences smashing palms to foreheads. Dimple-cheeked, she shifts between girlishness and world-weariness. In one especially raw moment she loses her temper at a care centre, screeching, squaring up to the support workers, throwing chairs. It’s a terrifying insight into how she might have landed in prison (the film never tells us what exactly Molly’s crime was, although there’s a mention of sniffer dogs). But then suddenly she is curled on the floor, keening for help, pleading for forgiveness: an exhausted toddler after a tantrum.

Sterling is lent able support by Idil Ahmed as Amina and TerriAnn Cousins as her mum, Sylvie. Newcomers Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads and Luke Howitt are nothing short of extraordinary: it’s a testament to the skill of casting director Lucy Pardee, also responsible for discovering the young stars of Rocks (2019), Aftersun (2022) and Bird (2024). But it is Sterling’s Molly who carries the film: cinematographer Jaime Ackroyd’s camera pushes in close, lending a harassed, in-your-face feel, while editor Lee Mckarkiel refuses the reverse shots that would lend some relief, consigning the action to the offscreen space as the film tightens the screws on Molly’s increasingly panicked reactions. There are moments of relief when the camera pulls back to offer Molly some space, as she dances with Amina to Architechs’ ‘Body Groove’ in a lurid purple hostel room, or marches through woodland with Ava and Leo, their hot little hands in hers. There is also terrible sadness, such as the moment Molly realises from the expressions on her children’s stricken faces that her impulsiveness has caught up with her.

The film is clear-sighted about the exigencies of the care system on both Molly and the individuals working within it. There are no villains here, no caricatures. Nor are there any galvanising, life-changing speeches. These women – and they are all women, right down to the judge who presides over the final custody hearing – are, in their own words, “just doing their jobs”, “looking out for the children’s best interests”. If these characters speak in clichés, it’s because that is how people speak. Likewise, Amina’s hackneyed attempts at reassuring Molly – telling her that women are tough, that sometimes your best is all you can do – have the hollow ring of a ‘Live Laugh Love’ poster, but what else is there to say, in the face of such well-intentioned but soul-destroying bureaucracy?

The film’s most moving, and most horrifying, lines are barely sentences. A child’s earnest declaration of love; a mother’s shamed apology; another mother’s dismissive admonition to her bereaved and desperate daughter, “not to start with me again”. It shows how lifetimes of trauma are compressed into a sob, a whimper, and, just occasionally, helpless gasping laughter.

► Lollipop is in UK cinemas now.