User Reviews

Charlotte (Maxine Peake) has devoted her life to her career and is disgusted when she discovers that she has been passed up for promotion. As a result of this she quits her job on the grounds of constructive dismissal. When she arrives home, she vents her anger out on her cleaner Maya whom Charlotte catches smoking in her apartment (despite Charlotte giving Maya a previous warning about not smoking in her apartment). Following an altercation between Charlotte and Maya, Charlotte's life takes a darker turn setting off a chain reaction of events that see her life spiralling out of control.

In the main Keeping Rosy is a pretty decent film - it has a sense of foreboding tension that makes it the sort of film that you don't want to take your eyes away from. That being said it is a film that does require some suspension of disbelief in order to be able to truly enjoy it - such as Charlotte managing to drag her cleaner's body in a sleeping bag out of her apartment, into a lift and out into the car park without anyone seeing? Possible? Yes... Likely? No. It seemed strange that you never really saw anyone in the apartments where Charlotte lived and yet the car park was always full of vehicles? It also seemed strange that Charlotte seemed to forget that her apartment complex had CCTV cameras and was only reminded of this when her sister saw her drop a box on her way into the apartment. Even if you never look at your CCTV cameras you'll know they are there as there are always signs telling you that there are CCTV cameras in areas where they are installed so it seemed unlikely that she would forget that the cameras were there. Anyway these are minor gripes and don't take away from the tension that exists on screen.

The film bogs down a little in the middle of the film when essentially we're just seeing Charlotte looking after her dead cleaner's child. If I'm honest not much happens in this section and whilst it's presumably included as an insight into Charlotte trying to cope with looking after someone other than herself it did slow the picture down somewhat and much of it felt a little unnecessary.

The film picks up again in the second half when Charlotte's sister Sarah (Christine Bottomley) comes to visit her and she brings home Roger (Blake Harrison) who happens to be the guy who works for the company that monitor the CCTV cameras. The story takes a predictable turn when Roger blackmails Charlotte by telling her he'll destroy the CCTV evidence of her committing the crime if Charlotte pays him £30,000. Despite the predictable turn of events here the picture still held my interest, but this is mainly thanks to a terrific turn from Blake Harrison. To be honest I've only ever seen him as Neil in The Inbetweeners and to see him play a character that at once is helpful and genuine to a callous opportunist that is prepared to cover up a crime for his own financial gain is a showcase of his talents. He was quite terrifying at times and for the most part made me forget about the wobbly screenplay. The likes of Christine Bottomley and Maxine Peake were also good, but it's Blake Harrison that was the real surprise and it was his performance I remembered the most when the film ended.

The end of the film is probably another one of those that may divide audiences. On the one hand you could look at it as being a bit of a cop-out and a lazy way to end the film. On the other hand you could look at as both Charlotte and Roger getting what they deserved as neither of them did the right thing in the first place. I can see arguments for both answers, but I think what lets the film down slightly is the lazy way it left so many loose ends untied and for that reason I'm more inclined to go with the first answer.

On the whole, and despite the questionable ending and some questionable aspects within the plot I did enjoy this film. It grinds a bit in the middle, but the simmering tension in the second half and the strong performances from the cast make it worth the effort.

Steve Reeves film, whose screenplay was written with Mike Oughton, tells the story of the what Charles Dickens might have described as "the worst of times and the best of times".

Charlotte (Maxine Peake) - a driven, ambitious and astute lawyer - stumbles over the fact that her male employers have betrayed her and passed her over for a promised promotion in favour of another lawyer, whom by virtue of gender alone has been unfairly selected for promotion in unjustified precedence over her.

Reeling from this straightforward and underhand duplicity, she struggles with feelings of furious anger as she travels home and tries to take in what has happened to her. Her career has been truncated unexpectedly; but she is a trained lawyer and tries to unscramble her feelings and rationalise them as she jouneys home to her 10th floor appartment.

Her hapless, impoverished, immigrant cleaner Maya (Elisa Lasowski) is smoking while hoovering the flat. It is Maya's birthday and in her bag she carries both a gift of of sparkling white wine and a card of good wishes from her partner or husband.

Misdirecting her fury at her unfair dismissal towards Maya; Charlotte replicates her own constructive dismissal by summarily dismissing Maya, who is no less angry at the outcome than Charlotte has been earlier.

Mistakenly, and no less unfairly, Charlotte falls into the misbelief that Maya has stolen the bottle of sparkling wine from her own fridge, where Cahrlotte has placed several bottles. They fight. Charlotte seizes the bottle and strikes Maya on the head - who dies shortly afterwards from a concussive cerebral haemhorrage. Only when her inert body is laying on the floor does Charlotte discover the birthday card which accompanied the bottle she has used to murder Maya.

Events continue to deteriorate as Charlotte foolishly tries to cover her tracks. Maya's infant child, Rosy, is still in the car where her dead mother has left her. As the action plays out, Charlotte developes a deep bond of affection with the child and involves her sister in covering up the awful crime.

More subterfuge, blackmail and a further suicide and murder ensues; but the audience is left with a sense of genuine remorse as Charlotte eventually acts in the best interests of Rosy bequeathing her to the care of her sister.

But the more responsible among us wonders; where's Dad, then, who bought the card and the bottle of bubbly for his wife's birthday ? Where's he in all this ?

I like Maxine Peake and the film started off well enough and I thought it might have turned into a good detective type of film, with Maxine getting deeper and deeper under suspicion. I had more than enough though when the whole film started to revolve around looking after the crying brat.

Don't bother watching this movie - it contains only pain and has a terrible ending. I wouldn't mind if this movie actually contained some form of redemption. As it is, all that happens is that things go from bad to worse, with no hope of anything getting better. It contains characters that are either heartless, hopeless, or both combined. Clearly the family that these two women grew up in had no capability for sensitivity or compassion, and the movie doesn't address this lack in any constructive way. I also don't believe a storyline where no one who knew the dead cleaning lady reported her absence, and the fact that she worked as a cleaning lady for the main character. If even only one person had reported her absence, there would be a strong likelihood that the police would have been involved early on, and would have been led straight to the scene of the crime.

The talents of Maxine Peake are wasted in this pretty much by the numbers so-called thriller. For one thing we're supposed to sympathise with this career woman who accidentally kills her cleaner in a fit of rage when she wallops the cleaner with a bottle of champagne the cleaner is carrying that Peake thinks is her own, only to later find out she was wrong. But why would the cleaner carry a heavy bottle of champagne up to Peake's flat rather than leave it in her car? And would she really leave her baby in the car, rather than bring it upstairs with her? The ending too was lazy, as if they didn't quite now how to get Peake out of her dilemma so they just tossed her and the security guard she was blackmailing out the window. Nor was there any point to the revelation that Peake had been having an affair with the man who got the promotion she was hoping for, it added nothing to the plot save to chew up a bit of time. Then there was the back story involving Peake and her sister and Peake's estrangement from their family, which didn't add anything either and whose only purpose seemed to be to fill out an empty plot. A weak film.

Maxine Peake is a go getting but brittle career woman who is severely put out when she is passed over a promotion. When she goes back to her flat she takes her frustrations out on her Polish cleaner and accidentally kills her with her champagne bottle but then discovers the cleaning lady's baby in the car.

As she tries to cover her tracks and get rid of the body she realises that she might had got caught on CCTV. This is when a slimy security guard enters her life demanding money from her with menace.

This is a doom laden film with plenty of London Docklands location shooting, many unlikeable characters, little plausibility and plot contrivances. This low budget movie comes across more as a gritty television film.

Peake mellows as she cares for the baby and becomes attached to it and in the end she will do anything to keep the baby safe.

I can not fault the actors who all give excellent performances but are let down largely due to the poor writing. The two characters are all two dimensional which makes it difficult to empathise with any of them. All the women in this film are portrayed as victims or heroines (even the one who commits murder) and all the men are perpetrators or villains. So to summarise women good, men bad, this kind of tedious stereotyping makes it difficult to take the film seriously at all unfortunately the plot very quickly spirals out of all believability. Apart from a lot of crying and screaming not much happens and the ending stretches credulity to the max.

I was left feeling cold and a little cheated. It is possible that I am just not the target audience and that had I have been a middle class women I would have enjoyed this film more. I can definitely see why the BBC commissioned this though, with 90% of it set in one apartment the lack of locations must have made it very cheap to make.

I have given three stars for the actors who where brilliant.