MCIn: The Magdalene Sisters

The triumphant story of three women who found the
courage to defy a century of injustice.

Peter Mullen's shocking drama The Magdalene Sisters is based on real events that took place in Ireland from the 1960s until 1996 when an estimated 30,000 young women, considered by their families to have committed sexual sins, were sent away from their homes to earn penitence working in profit-making laundries run by the Sisters of Magdalene Order. However, the acts the girls committed to have been sent to these miserable prisons were clearly not punishable. What's worse, the nuns were cruel money grubbers who worked the girls to the point of exhaustion, and used poor living conditions and psychological abuse to break and brainwash the girls into subservience. The awful treatment the nuns gave these innocent young women was terrifying, and the ways the girls suffered were utterly disturbing.

Mullen designed the fictional characters in the film based on interviews with actual survivors of the laundries, working their stories into his plot. Margaret is a shy girl who is raped by her cousin at a wedding shaming her family, Patricia/Rose gets pregnant and her parents take her baby away from her, Bernadette is a pretty girl who is deemed "too flirtatious," and Crispina is a loving young mom whose children are forbidden to see her and are being raised by her sister. The imposing Sister Bridget is pure evil, and will strike fear into the souls of viewers.

Geraldine McEwan .... Sister Bridget
Anne-Marie Duff .... Margaret
Nora-Jane Noone .... Bernadette
Dorothy Duffy .... Rose/Patricia
Eileen Walsh .... Crispina/Harriet
Mary Murray .... Una
Britta Smith .... Katy
Frances Healy .... Sister Jude
Eithne McGuinness .... Sister Clementine
Phyllis MacMahon .... Sister Augusta
Rebecca Walsh .... Josephine

Produced by:
Frances Higson

The Magdalene Sisters
Directed by: Peter Mullan
Release Date: August 1, 2003
Rated: R
Miramax Films

The Hot Button: Life is complex. The Magdalene Sisters is a small film in a small category that has so much power that it is as big as any Hollywood monster. The idea of that brings tears to my eyes.

Review: Peter Mullan’s excellent The Magdalene Sisters - winner of top prize at the most recent Venice Film festival - is the sort of quietly authoritative saga that understands it need not shout to convey its outrage. All he has to do is lay out the facts. The clergy that has already weathered brutal storms over the sexual impropriety of priests cannot deny the existence of these well-documented Dickensian work houses. They can attack the lapsed Catholic filmmaker for his depiction of conditions or simply decry the situation as a deplorable ink stain from the past.

Pride, Unprejudiced: So what's human life worth? Terror, scorn, anger, let's bring them together now and consider Peter Mullan's commanding The Magdalene Sisters, a sustained howl against affront and dishonor. His Venice Golden Lion-winning marvel is a concentrated yowl of righteous indignation, and whatever its flaws in demonstrating the horrors visited upon its composite characters, the white-hot intensity of the actor-writer-director's gaze gives us a wrenchingly cathartic drama, a brilliant, unrelenting screed against exploitation and injustice.