The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

Three young Irish women struggle to maintain their spirits while they endure dehumanizing abuse as inmates of a Magdalene Sisters Asylum.

Director:

Peter Mullan

Writer:

Peter Mullan

Stars:

Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy

Nominated for 1 BAFTA Film Award. Another 16 wins & 12 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Geraldine McEwan	...	Sister Bridget
Anne-Marie Duff	...	Margaret
Nora-Jane Noone	...	Bernadette
Dorothy Duffy	...	Rose / Patricia
Eileen Walsh	...	Crispina
Mary Murray	...	Una
Britta Smith	...	Katy
Frances Healy	...	Sister Jude
Eithne McGuinness	...	Sister Clementine
Phyllis MacMahon	...	Sister Augusta (as Phyllis McMahon)
Rebecca Walsh	...	Josephine
Eamonn Owens	...	Eamonn
Chris Patrick-Simpson	...	Brendan (as Chris Simpson)
Sean Colgan	...	Seamus
Daniel Costello	...	Father Fitzroy

Storyline

A thoroughly mind provoking film about 3 young women whom, under tragic circumstances see themselves cast away to a Magdalene Asylum for young women t in 1964. One of many like institutions, the asylums are run like prisons and young girls are forced to do workhouse laundry and hard labor. The asylum, one of many that existed in Theocratic Catholic Ireland, is for supposedly 'fallen' women. Here, young girls are imprisoned indefinitely and endure agonizing punishments and a long, harsh working system which leaves them physically drained and mentally damaged. As the girls bond together, it soon becomes clear that the only way out of the Magdalene convent is to escape, but with twisted Sister Bridget running the wing, any chances seem limited...

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Plot Keywords:

laundry | punishment | irish | catholic | escape | 

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Taglines:

In a place that defied belief their only hope was each other.

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Genres:

Drama

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for violence/cruelty, nudity, sexual content and language

Details

Official Sites:

Miramax [United States] Official site

Country:

Ireland UK

Language:

English Latin

Release Date:

25 October 2002 (Ireland)

Also Known As:

Die unbarmherzigen Schwestern

Filming Locations:

Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK

Box Office

Opening Weekend:

$19,025 (Hong Kong) (10 October 2003)

Gross:

$4,890,878 (USA) (21 November 2003)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Scottish Screen, Film Council, Bórd Scannán na hÉireann

Technical Specs

Runtime:

119 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Peter Mullan has remarked that the film was initially made because victims of Magdalene Asylums had no closure. They had not received any recognition, compensation, or apology, and many remained lifelong devout Catholics.

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Goofs

The guitar the man plays at the beginning of the film is a Taylor acoustic guitar. Taylor Guitars was not established until 1974.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Margaret: Well, what is it you're wanting to show me? Come on, Kevin, what's the secret?

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Crazy Credits

Thanks to ... Andy and Marco at Edit-Hire Post Production Services ... all at the Glasgow Film Theatre ... Lee at Lynx ... all the gardeners ... the people of Dumfries ... and all at VFG.

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Connections

Version of Sex in a Cold Climate (1998)

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Soundtracks

"The Well Below the Valley"
(uncredited)
Traditional Irish folksong
Sung by the priest at the wedding

User Reviews

A Horrific and Gripping Recounting of True Evil

"The Magdalene Sisters" is not, as some have claimed, a one-dimensional anti-Catholic film exploiting what are arguably especially gruesome atrocities. It is a fact-based drama about three teenage girls who found themselves in 1964 sentenced to work in a laundry run by an Irish religious order for an indefinite term and under conditions that made most audience members shudder.

In three brief vignettes before the main title, the girls are introduced. One is brutally raped by a cousin at a wedding while priests perform traditional Irish songs. Immediately telling a woman, instead of support she becomes the subject of a hasty conspiracy to spirit the rapist from the wedding and to place her in the Magdalene asylum.

A second girl gives birth to a baby - in the not long ago past, illegitimacy was the label. She is pressured by a priest to surrender the baby boy and then she, too, is hustled off to the asylum.

The third victim is in an orphanage where she gets under the director's skin for no other offense than she is pretty and boys from the neighborhood crowd a fence to call down to her. Transfer to the asylum follows.

The Magdalene laundries made money for the order running them and the asylum to which the three girls were committed is, in this film, a moral charnel house. Sister Bridget, the head nun, interviews the girls while fingering, with almost erotic delight, rolls of money. Her desk sports a photo of President Kennedy but a picture of Ilse Koch would have been a more suitable iconographic representation of her character. She is a sadist, first class.

What follows is almost unrelieved tedium for the girls interspersed with brutal physical chastisement and agonizing sexual humiliation inflicted by perverted nuns. Sexual orientation isn't my issue, it's the awful victimization of helpless young girls.

Through the fine acting of the cast the complexity of relationships and the nature of choices become engrossing. To accommodate or to resist. To comply or to engage in sabotage, even in small ways as a declaration of non-surrender. Sabotage is possible but can an inexperienced and angry teen foresee the consequences of a minor act of resistance? An anticipated humorous defiance may well have tragic results.

The film centers on the three girls as well as several other asylum inmates ranging from a young woman descending slowly into irreversible madness and an elderly crone who believes her lifetime of servitude guarantees entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven. This tortured soul is the nuns' "capo," the inmate without whose help the asylum's strictures can't be enforced. Comparison to the Gulag camps and the Nazi concentration camps is apropos.

"The Magdalene Sisters" doesn't portray all the girls as angels but it does show the nuns and the occasional male clergy as evil exploiters and sadistic hypocrites. Is that fair? The end credits report that some 30,000 women were involuntarily placed in Magdalene asylums until the last one closed in 1996. Were all inmates so tortured and beaten? I don't know but these three girls certainly have had THEIR experience recorded for a population that appears to have turned a blind eye to what should have been a national scandal decades earlier. Their life after the asylum is reported in the end credits. All paid a price for a stolen adolescence.

The asylum in this film is pure evil, religious doctrine run amuck in the quest for money through cheap labor and in the riotous unleashing of perversity. English judges for centuries have often used a word rarely found in American case law to describe persons and events: the word is wicked. This film projects an unending parade of wicked people performing wicked acts. It doesn't condemn Catholicism, it indicts the operation by the church in Ireland of one type of soul and body destroying evil. The Church can no more defend the Magdalene asylums than it can the predatory pedophiles in the priesthood. That's the simple reality.

Audience members loudly gasped and a number cried during the showing. This isn't a film for the fainthearted or those who want their illusions about a bucolic and verdant Ireland filled with dancing and music unaffected by the reality of a genuine tragedy now coming to light.

8/10.