The Magdalene Sisters

Plot

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

Release Year: 2002

Rating: 7.8/10 (13,929 voted)

Critic's Score: 83/100

Director:
Peter Mullan

Stars: Eileen Walsh, Dorothy Duffy, Nora-Jane Noone

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…

Cast:

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

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

Details

Official Website:
Miramax [United States] |

Release Date: 25 October 2002

Filming Locations: Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK

Opening Weekend: €64,807
(Italy)
(1 September 2002)
(29 Screens)

Gross: $15,722,258
(Worldwide)
(6 November 2003)
(except USA)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

119 min

Did You Know?

Trivia:

The film that the nuns and penitents watch is
The Bells of St. Mary's

Goofs:

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

Quotes:

[first lines]

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

User Review

A Horrific and Gripping Recounting of True Evil

Rating: 8/10

"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.