‘Act 3’ review: Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor muse on the nature of storytelling in opulent, moving documentary | Reviews

Dirs: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor. Ireland/UK. 2026. 83mins

You might see the documentary essays of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor as exercises in thinking aloud, in words and images – though this might suggest that their films are less deliberately structured than they actually are. Nevertheless, Act 3, the latest from the London-based Irish duo, genuinely suggests a free-ranging, quizzical investigation of creativity and storytelling, presented as a dialogue between Molloy and Lawlor – and between the film-makers and the footage, ideas and stories they muse on There are elements of Godard, Akerman and Chris Marker here, but Molloy and Lawlor are warmer and more comic than those comparisons might suggest.

Philosophically provocative, but vividly accessible

Following previous essay features Further Beyond (2016) and The Future Tense (2022), London Film Festival competition premiere Act 3 will have similar niche appeal, but should consolidate the visibility of a hugely inventive partnership whose output – fictions and docs alike – deserves to be seen as one continuously evolving long-term project.

Like their previous documentaries, Act 3 is based around prepared texts, spoken here by Molloy and Lawlor, each filmed separately at a diagonal, as if addressing both the viewer and each other. They open by contemplating the dilemma of beginnings and endings, the difficulty of knowing the end of a story and the necessity of knowing the start – prompting clips of the openings of their fiction films, from Helen (2008) to Baltimore (2023).

Endings are an intractable problem, however: a mooted project has stalled because, they were told, they haven’t satisfactorily solved the question of ’Act 3’. But, with Molloy and Lawlor now in their 60s, they are also facing the unknowable third act of their own lives, which leads them to review family history, their working relationship, their marriage and their travels.

Much of Act 3 is built around their journeys in South-East Asia, documented in up-to-date footage, and in video and stills from their personal archive: trips to Cambodia and to Thailand, the home of Lawlor’s brother John, whose expat life fuelled the couple’s 2013 fiction feature Mister John, generously excerpted here. With material from past trips and the couple’s most recent visit to Thailand (accompanied by their adult daughter Molly, at first only intermittently glimpsed) to see John and his Thai wife Kai, Act 3 considers the possibility that travel – rather than broadening the mind, as the cliché goes – might rather entail a dissociative state, even “a dissolution of identity”.

Paralleling all this is a mini-biography of another original couple, the French artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, born Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe – stepsisters, lovers and artistic collaborators who reinvented their identities (in name, and in their imaginative photographs) as figures in Paris’s bohemian and Surrealist culture between the wars.

Act 3 also takes in current protest over Gaza, vignettes of Lawlor’s family (his father’s death, his brother Derry’s blindness) and Molloy and Lawlor’s collaborative history, going back to their experimental theatre work. Themes of Irish identity are once again integral, often presented with characteristic deadpan wryness: as in a passage on mishearing ‘Bali Hai’, the ballad from South Pacific, as ‘Ballyheigue’, in Country Kerry. There are also quotations from writers Annie Ernaux, Rebecca Solnit and Joanna Pocock; even a digression on the Stylistics number ‘People Make the World Go Round’ as an analysis of tardy capitalism.

It makes for a dense fabric indeed, but one crafted with lightness – and, at 83 minutes, bracing concision. Philosophically provocative, but vividly accessible, Act 3 is a opulent disquisition on mortality, memory, culture and identity. It’s also a moving self-portrait of a original and personal partnership that emerges as very much a marriage of minds – intensely curious and questioning minds at that.