The Magdalene Sisters Review

by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)
January 27th, 2004
THE MAGDALENE SISTERS
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2004 David N. Butterworth

*** (out of ****)

    "It is estimated that as many as 30,000 women were detained at Magdalene asylums throughout Ireland" summarizes the epilogue of Peter Mullan's harrowing
"The Magdalene Sisters." And if that statistic isn't startling enough, consider
this addendum: "The last laundry closed in 1996." Mullan's film, which takes place in County Dublin in 1964, is a controversial indictment of the dehumanizing
practices that took place within the walls of these convent-like prisons, where
"wayward" girls were sent under the guise of religious rehabilitation, mostly against their will, by parents or guardians who wanted shot of them. In "The Magdalene Sisters," Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is raped by her cousin at a family
wedding, Rose (Dorothy Duffy) bears a child out of wedlock, and Bernadette (Nora
Jane Noone) fraternizes with the local boys outside her orphanage gates. For their sins these young girls are abandoned by their families and forced into a life of hard labor washing soiled sheets and bed linens, a lifetime sentence with no possible chance of parole at the brutish hands of the Sisters of Mercy.
When these poor unfortunates do step out of line they are whipped, have their heads brutally shaved, or stripped and humiliated before their peers. Overseeing
this inhumanity is the despotic Sister Bridget (a chilling Geraldine McEwan), whose calm cold-heartedness cuts at the very core of these innocent girls, inflicting
psychological pain as devastating as any physical punishment. Mullan, who felt
this story needed to be told to the masses after seeing "Sex in a Cold Climate,"
a television documentary about the "order," keeps his viewpoint unfalteringly one-sided and, not surprisingly, the film has been well and truly denounced by the Catholic Church. "The Magdalene Sisters," painfully realized by a cast of relative unknowns, is unrelentingly grim, gruesome and, if you were raised Catholic, frighteningly plausible.

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David N. Butterworth
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