Set in Ireland, Joyride can be thought of as a road movie centred on two characters who by chance come to share a journey. Thirteen-year-old Mully (Charlie Reid), whose mother has just died of cancer, confronts his trickster father (Lochlann Ó Mearáin) when he pinches money from a pub’s charitable fundraising. The boy then snatches the cash and drives off with it in a taxi. Lo and behold, he suddenly realises that there are passengers in the back seat of the cab in the form of a solicitor named Joy (that’s Colman’s role) and her recently born baby. He is heading for a ferry whereas she intends to deposit the baby with her sister (Aisling O’Sullivan) and then to catch a plane to Lanzarote. Since young Mully has stolen the taxi as well as being an underage driver, they could easily be stopped by the authorities and in any case Mully’s dad is soon in hot pursuit and thus another threat to them.

This may sound like an unlikely plot, but it is even more improbable when you see it. The fact that the director, Emer Reynolds, is working from a screenplay that has no consistency of tone whatever adds to the problem. At heart Joyride wants to show how a mother, one who lacks maternal feelings and wants to abandon her child, can be made to think things over when she comes under the unexpected influence of a stranger. That the stranger in question should be only thirteen years of age but should also be a competent driver and a boy sensitive enough to look after the baby and capable of advising Joy about breastfeeding doesn’t exactly add to the believability of the situation. Nor is there any sense of what tone might have helped to make the film work.

I have seen Joyride described as a fairytale, but to call it that doesn’t solve the problem. It may at times want to be light and fanciful, but it is frequently foul-mouthed and early on it also features a scene in which a fox is hit by the taxi and then has to be run over to put it out of its misery. If some things are played out in an extravagantly comic style (a scene on a plane is a good example of this), the plot also involves flashbacks to Joy as a child undergoing a traumatic experience. The drama present at that point, which is subsequently matched by an incident at the film’s climax which is almost a variant on that early moment, is, of course, totally incompatible with all those would-be comic scenes which feel totally divorced from real life. Furthermore, at intervals there are occasions when the film is briefly on the verge of becoming a musical (if snatches of song are sometimes incorporated on screen, even more use is made of song on the soundtrack). On top of everything else, there are moments of sentimental symbolism that grate.

Given that Olivia Colman recently played a character lacking in maternal feelings in The Lost Daughter, you might see Joyride as offering her a role that could be seen as a decidedly different variation on her role in that film. But that only makes it the more extraordinary that Colman should have found the screenplay acceptable. With this material, the players never stood a chance. That said, young Charlie Reid is a newcomer of some promise. But, while he seems undaunted by his material, it’s a pity that the leading role that he has landed is in such a poorly conceived work.