Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Joyride’ on Hulu, a Road-Trip Dramedy in Which Young Charlie Reid Holds His Own Next to Olivia Colman

Olivia Colman stars in – well, something we want to see, simply because she’s in it. This time it’s Joyride (now on Hulu), an intimate, small-scale character study from longtime documentary director Emer Reynolds. Our beloved Oscar- (and nearly every other award-) winning star plays a woman who makes unlikely friends with a motherless 12-year-old boy – played by the revelatory Charlie Reid – which is perfect timing, considering she’s struggling with the notion of motherhood at the same time. That’s a tidy narrative contrivance, sure, but if anyone can out-act a screenplay, it’s Colman.  

JOYRIDE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: All Mully (Reid) has is memories. His mother was a warm, loving woman, and now she’s gone. Cancer. Everyone down the poob pitches in to raise money in her name for a cancer charity, and while Mully’s rousing the crowd with his considerable karaoke skills, he notices his good-for-nothing father James (Lochlann O’Mearain) has kipped off with the wad of donation cash. Mully gets it back, dashes away, finds an idling driverless taxi, hops in, peels off, gets a ways down the road, looks in the backseat and sees a woman back there, snoring, a baby alongside her. Whoops. Error! Error! But we’ve all been there, right? Running off with the money your dad stole so you can give it back to charity and then realizing you’ve just accidentally kidnapped a (possibly passed-out drunk) lady and her newborn? Happens ALL THE TIME.

The woman is Joy (Colman), and instead of waking up and insisting the kid bring her back, she insists they keep going. Gotta go forward, she says, sounding desperate, maybe even distraught. He agrees, somewhat reluctantly. They live in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, and even though they don’t know each other know each other, each knows who the other is, because everyone hangs down the poob. Joy knows Mully as the kid whose dear mother passed away, and Mully, not knowing Joy’s name is Joy, calls her Vodka Tonic, because she apparently drinks a lot of those. 

Eventually, the prickly banter between them cools and Mully shares that his dad needs the cash to pay off the type of people who’ll kneecap a bloke. And Joy shares that she’s going to give the baby away, to a close friend. She doesn’t know who the father is. And she holds the child like it’s an animal that might bite her at any moment. She seems terrified of her own daughter. She defends her decision: “People give babies away all the time! To Romanian orphanages, to child traffickers, to Chinese gymnastic academies.”

And so their semi-wacky road trip across Ireland goes: Stealing a second vehicle, running out of gas, hitching rides with oddballs, taking a ferry trip, dodging the authorities, etc. Mully helps Joy breastfeed the baby – she hadn’t succeeded in getting the girl to latch, but Mully helped take care of his baby sister and knows these things and foreshadows a potentially wonderful future as a pediatric nurse. Of course, all the things they’re running away from will catch up to them, because that’s what things you’re running away from inevitably do, whether they’re physical things or psychological things, and boy, do they have a bunch of both of those things. But now they have each other, it seems.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Colman’s character in the sublime The Lost Daughter was cut from similar cloth as Joy, but her take on reluctant motherhood was more nuanced, difficult, complex, bewildering and any number of other superlatives. 

Performance Worth Watching: Yes, Colman is terrific. She’ll never not be terrific in anything, it seems. But it’s nice to see Reid hold his own across from such a stalwart – their chemistry makes the movie.

Memorable Dialogue: Our two principals play coy with each other: 

Mully: So, Vodka Tonic, where ya off to?

Joy: What’s with the ball of money rammed down your jocks?

Sex and Skin: Nothing potentially objectionable, unless you’re one of those insufferable people who’s offended by the sight of a baby suckling her mother’s breast.

Our Take: Without the by-turns warm and combative Colman-Reid interplay, Joyride might be easily dismissed as contrived, predictable piffle. The screenplay is rickety, formulaic in its plotting and semi-poignant character arcs. And if it doesn’t quite adhere to the rubric of typical odd-couple road-trip dramedies, it doesn’t quite avoid them either. After a while, you can’t help but wonder why the cops haven’t caught up with their trail of stolen vehicles, but the point is, our two protagonists are feeling fraught and living in the moment, worrying about legal consequences later. (One of the movie’s running jokes is, Joy plans to blame her poor decisions on postpartum psychosis.)

Although its core conceit is comedic – and more than a little bit ridiculous – the film functions better when it leans on its heavier dramatic fenceposts. Most potent is the mutual caretaking occurring between Joy and Mully, who are closer to each other on the irresponsibility scale than they should be: She’s regressive, emotionally fragile, haunted by a profoundly upsetting memory of her mother, all prompting her drastic decisions. And he’s been forced into early maturity by his mother’s passing and his father’s callous selfishness. Do they form a mother-son relationship? Yeah, kinda, but it’s more complicated than that. An old woman dubs them “Reckless Joy and the Half-Orphan,” which sounds like quite the pair, two people who complement each other; watching Reid and Coman lean into that dynamic is often enjoyable, no matter how ramshackle the movie around them can be. 

Our Call: Joyride is a classic case of quality acting transcending a middling screenplay. STREAM IT, because Colman is among the best in the business right now. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.