Daisy-May Hudson’s Lollipop is a fierce and necessary fiction feature burning with the truth of lived experience. In this impassioned story of one mother’s post-prison struggle to regain her children, Hudson lays bare the punitive systems that punish poverty, pathologise emotion, and criminalise the survival strategies of women who are already navigating impossible odds. Drawing on her own experiences of homelessness in Half Way (2015), Hudson’s debut fiction film sits squarely in the tradition of Loach and Arnold, but with a vital, distinctly feminist eye that frames this story as not just one of injustice, but of structural betrayal - particularly of working-class, single mothers.

Molly, brought to life in a raw and incandescent performance by Posy Sterling, is a young woman released from prison into a world that offers neither welcome nor restitution. Her crime remains unspecified - a deliberate choice, perhaps, to underline how often women are criminalised for acts of desperation tied to poverty, domestic violence, or mental health crises. The statistics support this: most women in prison are there for non-violent offences linked to poverty or attempts to escape untenable domestic situations. Lollipop doesn’t sensationalise this reality; it refuses to moralise. Instead, it insists on the viewer’s empathy by making clear how deeply the deck is stacked against someone like Molly.

From the moment Molly leaves prison, she is not met with rehabilitation, but with a series of Kafkaesque obstacles. Her mother, played with devastating opacity by TerriAnn Cousins, has turned her children over to social services. Molly is told she cannot regain custody without stable housing, but is refused family housing because she doesn’t have custody. This isn’t just a catch-22 - it’s a trap, one designed to collapse hope. Through quietly devastating sequences, the film exposes the impossible circular logic of social systems that claim to protect children while punishing their mothers for being poor, angry, or alone.

And anger, in Lollipop, is as dangerous as poverty. Molly’s frustrated outbursts are interpreted as instability, her heartbreak as volatility. The film is particularly astute in showing how emotions - especially in women - are surveilled and weaponised. Her grief is reframed as a mental health risk. Her love for her children, expressed with urgency and fear, is pathologised. This is a system that rewards passivity, even as it pushes women to the brink. One particularly brutal scene sees Molly walk into what she believes will be a reunion with her children, only to face a tribunal of care professionals - each one a woman, each one clearly burdened by the very roles they are forced to play. Hudson doesn’t scapegoat these workers, nor does she let them off the hook. Instead, she presents them as caught within the same system, one that uses women to police and punish other women.

It is no accident that the men in this story are largely absent or invisible - Molly’s exes, the fathers of her children, have vanished from her life, leaving her to bear the full weight of social and emotional responsibility. This is a reality faced by countless single mothers, many of whom are left not only unsupported but actively punished for attempting to cope alone. Lollipop never forgets this imbalance, instead making it central to its critique. Women are expected to pick up every piece, and when they fail to do so quietly, they are deemed unfit.

In its themes and emotional force, Lollipop echoes recent Irish films such as Paddy Breathnach’s Rosie and Phyllida Lloyd’s Herself. Like Lollipop, Rosie follows a mother caught in a brutal housing crisis, moving from car to hotel with her children while trying to hold her family together in the face of mounting bureaucracy and public indifference. And Herself tells the story of a woman escaping domestic violence who tries to build her own home - both physically and metaphorically - only to encounter institutional obstruction at every turn. In all three films, the state presents itself as neutral or benevolent, while quietly maintaining a web of impossibilities designed to humiliate, delay and ultimately erase women who dare to act independently. What Lollipop adds to this cinematic lineage is the particular lens of post-carceral motherhood and the way social control seeps into maternal identity and emotional expression itself.

Lollipop is not an entirely miserable tale, and Hudson’s vision is filled with tenderness. The friendship between Molly and Amina (Idil Ahmed) is a lifeline - for Molly, the audience, and the film’s emotional core. Their bond is forged in shared experience and mutual care, from moments of breakdown to bursts of joy. A scene in which Amina responds to Molly’s anger with compassion, only for that anger to immediately melt to heart-wrenching grief, is one of the most powerful in the film, showing how empathy, compassion and understanding can unlock anyone’s core and model the need for not just kindness, but genuine support.

Sterling’s performance carries the film with a magnetic, wounded energy. Molly is not a symbol or a victim - she is a person. She is flawed, impulsive, loving, angry. Sterling gives her a rich emotional interior, and Hudson’s writing allows those emotions to live on screen without tidy resolution. Even in moments of deep chaos, the film resists melodrama, trusting instead in the authenticity of lived emotion. That authenticity is supported by a mostly female cast and creative team, who imbue the story with a deep understanding of the kinds of violence that don’t always leave bruises, but leave scars all the same.

The fact that every adult character - council worker, shopkeeper, probation officer - is played by a woman is deeply telling. Lollipop is about what happens to women when the state fails them, and about how that failure is masked by bureaucracy, protocol and procedure. Hudson’s film makes clear that this isn’t about bad apples or rogue decisions, but a systemic design that makes martyrs of single mothers and invisibilises the men who let them fall.

Lollipop is a powerful, furious, and tender-hearted film. It demands not only that we look at the structures which brutalise women, but that we recognise the quiet heroism of those who survive within them. Hudson doesn’t just tell a story - she offers testimony. And it is impossible to walk away from this film unmoved.

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below.