Lollipop review – impassioned, head-butting indictment of the social-care system

Daisy-May Hudson is the British film-maker who in 2015 made a fiercely personal documentary about homelessness: her own. Half Way told the story of how she, her mum and her 13-year-old sister lost their home and then found themselves in the bureaucratic nightmare of hostels and halfway houses, and her camera showed the audience every excruciating moment.

Now Hudson has developed these ideas as a fiction feature in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird and Cathy Come Home. It’s an impassioned, humane and urgently performed drama, a vivid look at what it’s like to be reduced to screaming anguish by the system – as well as what it’s like to work for the system, and to be the brick wall getting screamed at.

Posy Sterling plays Molly, a single mother who emerges from prison expecting to be immediately reunited with her two young children. To her astonishment, she finds that her own mother (TerriAnn Cousins), in whose care she had placed her kids while she was inside, has handed them over to social services, claiming to be too stressed for this task while she was looking after her dying partner. Now Molly is homeless, initially living in a tent, unable on that basis to be awarded custody of her children, and only able to get a single person’s flat, so disqualified from getting them all over again.

The film shows that her every head-butting encounter with authority is an ordeal of fear, shame and rage – especially as she feels she has served her time and paid her debt to society, but is now placed in a new insidious kind of jail. Her natural instinct is angrily to demand that these solemn lanyard-wearing council employees just hand over her children. But she’s also wretchedly aware that her actions will judged as those of someone dangerously unstable and in poor mental health. “Am I being tested? Is that what’s going on?” she yells at one stage.

And she is.

There is a rather terrifying scene in which Molly walks into an anonymous-looking room, anticipating tearful hugs with the children, only to be confronted by an inquisition of care-workers. Clearly, it feels for Molly like school, like failing an exam that she didn’t know she had to take – and this is the kind of exam which you fail simply by turning up. All of the officials are women in the “care” business, a gender-based irony that the film lets us absorb gradually over the running time. Some of them are uncaring, but many quite genuinely not: for them, denying Molly is their own professional ordeal. And Molly is to make things very much worse for herself by attempting to abduct the children.

Molly herself doesn’t get much support from her mum, a drinker with depression who in one early scene makes Molly sing in public at her partner’s wake; a rather beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace which lets us see, poignantly, what she was like as a little girl. Her only friend is Amina (Idil Ahmed), who is herself in a homeless hostel with her child and helps Molly, belatedly, navigate the system. A powerful, vehement testimony.

• Lollipop screens at the Edinburgh film festival.