Losing for Innocence
Having escaped her northern roots Charlotte (Maxine Peake) is a career focused woman, living in a stylish flat in the centre of London and has a good job at a media agency. But then everything starts to crumble on the day that the married work colleague she has been sleeping with gets promoted over her as she returns home in a mood and takes her anger out on her cleaner. One moment of madness leads to a series of desperate acts as Charlotte finds her life spiralling out of control.
That synopsis for "Keeping Rosy" does an extremely poor job of telling you what actually happens but to reveal that moment of madness or any of the desperate acts which Charlotte finds herself doing would spoil what is a surprisingly entertaining movie. Of course being a movie reviewer that leaves me in a quandary because how do you review a movie when you are being intentionally sketchy on the detail. Well when it comes to "Keeping Rosy" what I can say is think of a black comedy and think of scenes where someone clumsily tries to dispose of a body but ends up having several accidents with the body. Well you get something similar here but it isn't comedy, it is strangely engaging and dark as we see Charlotte going from one bad decision to another.
So what else can I say. Well there are some certainly entertaining performances from Christine Bottomley and Blake Harrison who not only brings a touch of awkward humour to his character but also some surprising menace. But truth be told "Keeping Rosy" is all about Maxine Peake and it is a wonderful performance which conveys so much from being career focused to showing bits of her Northern roots creeping through to discovering a side to her personality she never realised she had.
What this all boils down to is that "Keeping Rosy" is certainly worth a watch if you ever come across it because whilst dark it is also surprisingly easy to follow and entertaining. And most of that is down to Maxine Peake who delivers a brilliant performance as Charlotte.
