The Magdalene Sisters film review

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THE MAGDALENE SISTERS

With his first film My Name is Joe, writer/director and performer Peter Mullan showed that he was not afraid to tackle issues (in this case alcoholism) that would make most directors, let alone studios, quake in their boots. His new effort is again deserving of all the right adjectives: hard-hitting, unflinching, stark and often brutal. Since the film has already condemned by the Catholic Church we know there must be some good reason to view it, and while it is not an easy two hours to spend in the cinema the results are thought-provoking and worthwhile.

The film purports to tell the distinctly unsavory but true story of the Order of the Magdalene Sisters, a convent of Irish nuns so fierce that Mullan could have satisfactorily called his film Full Metal Habits. They terrorised Ireland, or at least the young girls of Ireland, until late into the last century. Their convents, ostensibly places where errant young women could find the path to salvation and Jesus were actually little more than prison camps where the inmates were subjected to regular humiliations, beatings and punishments that seem to have little in common with any of the Biblical teachings. Mullan adopts a simple but effective storytelling ruse: he follows the stories of three girls who arrived at the Dublin convent on the same day in 1964. All three were sent for spurious reasons: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) because she was raped and her family chose to believe it was her fault, Patricia (Dorothy Duffy) because she dared to have a baby out of wedlock and Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) simply because she occasionally flirted with a lad or two.

When the girls arrive their transformation is swift: forced to don pallid brown uniforms, their main occupation is to spend all day every day in the laundry, scrubbing in silence. Conditions are grim and it is clearly a place where the joy of Catholicism has turned its back. The film then charts the girls attempts to struggle against the system they have unjustly found themselves in and ideally manage to escape from the prison.