Photo: Dorothy Duffy as Rose in Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters
The attention-grubbing The Magdalene Sisters recounts the Dickensian horrors faced by "wayward girls" inside Ireland's Magdalene laundries. These forced labor camps supervised by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order first came to director Peter Mullan's attention through the Channel 4 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, which detailed how 30,000-plus women were interned inside these houses before the last one was shut down in the mid-'90s. Taking on what he sees as the Catholic Church's fundamentally sexist and oppressive belief that sin is born to woman, Mullan allows the film's devastating intro to play out like excerpts from a book of Bible stories: Rose (Dorothy Duffy) conceives a child outside of wedlock, Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is raped by her cousin at a family wedding, and Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) dares to look at the boys standing outside the gates of her schoolyard. Shipped away by their families to the Magdalene laundry house, the girls are dutifully tortured and humiliated by a group of nuns overseen by the hideous Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan, giving Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched a run for her money). Pain begets pain here and there's no reprieve in sight.
The attention-grubbing The Magdalene Sisters recounts the Dickensian horrors faced by "wayward girls" inside Ireland's Magdalene laundries. These forced labor camps supervised by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order first came to director Peter Mullan's attention through the Channel 4 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, which detailed how 30,000-plus women were interned inside these houses before the last one was shut down in the mid-'90s. Taking on what he sees as the Catholic Church's fundamentally sexist and oppressive belief that sin is born to woman, Mullan allows the film's devastating intro to play out like excerpts from a book of Bible stories: Rose (Dorothy Duffy) conceives a child outside of wedlock, Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is raped by her cousin at a family wedding, and Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) dares to look at the boys standing outside the gates of her schoolyard. Shipped away by their families to the Magdalene laundry house, the girls are dutifully tortured and humiliated by a group of nuns overseen by the hideous Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan, giving Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched a run for her money). Pain begets pain here and there's no reprieve in sight.
