Joyride (2022 film)

Set in County Kerry, Ireland, this road movie is centered on 13-year-old Mully who’s just lost his mother, and Joy, a solicitor, and her newborn baby.

His mother Ruth has just died of cancer, and Mully confronts his thieving father James who has just pinched the cancer hospice money from the collection jar at her celebration of life gathering at the pub. His dad insists she would have wanted him to have it, to use to pay for his own debts. The boy grabs the cash and drives off in a taxi, planning to give it back. Suddenly he realizes there are passengers in the back seat.

These characters by chance come to share a journey. Joy, clearly overwhelmed by her needy newborn, seeing Mully’s ease at caring for her child (he’d been helping care for a baby sibling at home), proposes they travel together. They swap the taxi for a car in a used car lot.

Joy and Mully take the backroads to remain undetected as he is an unlicensed driver, and they could be stopped by the law. As this odd couple travels, they bond, quarreling and then developing a mother-son bond. Mully accidentally hits a fox with the taxi and then Joy has to run it over to put it out of its misery.

As they walk to get more petrol, Mully proposes they take turns asking and answering questions. So, he explains about the hospice money, and Joy plans to give up the baby to her friend Max and then fly to Lanzarote, as she hasn’t bonded with the baby and doesn’t know who the father is.

Calling James from the petrol station, Mully is convinced by his father to head for a ferry, which Joy initially rejects. However, when a police checkpoint goes wrong, she changes her mind about the ferry, swaps for another car.

While waiting for the next ferry, Mully even helps Joy learn how to breastfeed Robin (she thought up the name upon seeing a robin alight nearby), as he observed his infant sibling. She tells him she and his mother were in the same class at school, Joy of the brightest and Ruth extremely beautiful.

Mully’s dad catches up with them, and Mully convinces him to let Joy and Robin go with them in the car. They go to a B&B when Joy hemorrhages, so she can get cleaned up and rest. In the meantime, his father has thought up a lie, wanting Mully to lie to them at the pub, saying he stole the money and then got robbed.

Joy calls up her childhood friend Max, letting her know she had the baby one week early, her name’s Robin and she’s breastfed her. Then she tells her about a repressed memory from her childhood. The day she and her mother saw her dad cheating, afterward, Joy had gone into the sea. When the undertone started to get her, she saw her mother hesitate to save her. Joy tells Max she’ll be there soon.

The next morning, before leaving, Joy gives the hospice money back to Mully so he can do the right thing. Hurt she’s leaving him and going through with giving away Robin, he lashes out, insulting her. In a daze and with an emotional crisis, she drops Robin off on Max’s doorstep, then drives on to Kerry airport in deep denial about her own nascent feelings.

No sooner does Joy board the Spain-bound plane than she has a change of heart. Insisting they let her off, she races back to find Mully. Locating him, he initially tells her off, but James appears demanding the money. Joy tries to protect Mully from his father, but he races to the water, throwing the cash over his shoulder. His father retrieves the cash, while she fishes him out of the water.

The film ends with Max calling Joy to pick up a distraught Robin, and she drives by the pub with Mully to return the stolen money and then collect the baby.