The Magdalene Sisters

I would give this film 20 out of 10! Excellent acting, nimble direction and very well crafted representations of real-historical events and persons. Eileen Walsh should get a special award for an incredible performance as Crispina - Eileen, you are fantastic! I look forward to more from you! What shook me was the realization that this movie captured the interplay of Dickensian exploitation interwoven with the fascistic barbarity of the church. The laundry was a slave-plantation par excellence as it ground its physically, sexually and emotionally exploited slaves within an atmosphere of sheer terror and self-hatred - we deserve what we get because we are guilty - shame on us - this is what the masters of every plantation on this planet sought to instill in slaves.

What I would have liked to see developed further was how this laundry-plantation fit within the wider Irish society - whose clothes were being washed, and what was their relationship to the people who were incarcerated here? Religion's role in the sheer brutalization of its adherents has been evidenced throughout history - no mass religion has brought anything other than terror, subjugation and self-hatred to women - this film proves it beyond doubt! As men, we are beneficiaries of such brutalities to women - and we are like Margaret's brother - who sheepishly mutters some nonsense about waiting to grow up while his sister lived in hell. What pained me most in this film was the terrible scene of uniformed men dragging Crispina out of the dormitory - to her destruction - and here the most painful part was noting that none of the women could shake off their terror to help their sister who cried for help. The scene captured in a brutal moment, the truth that tyranny can only thrive with our collective fear. Religion like other totalitarian ideologies rules by internalized terror.

Enough, go on and watch this movie, its worth every tear you shed, because in the end, you will find that being disturbed makes you recognize the suffering of every Crispina, Margaret, Rose, Bernadette among us.

"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.

What is the difference between the parents of the girls in the asylum and the nuns who ran it? Absolutely nothing; they were both guilty of unspeakable crimes against these girls.

What is the difference between the nuns and Southerners? Absolutely nothing; they both used people as slaves.

The nuns silence as a weapon to keep the women from getting to know each other. One woman (Mary Murray) who ran away is brought back by her father (Peter Mullan), who beats her up in front of the women in the dormitory. Her hair is then cut off by Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) in an attempt to further degrade her. In another instance, the three new arrivals along with others are forced to stand naked in front of a nun who ridicules their body parts. Crispina (Eileen Walsh) is sexually abused by a priest.

The Catholic Church has never apologized for the horrendous and inhumane treatment of over 10,000 girls that were imprisoned in these asylums over a period of 70 years, ending as recently as 1996. To this day, various Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists continue to subjugate women on account of their fear and hatred of female sexuality and freedom.

Enough has been said about the plot and characters by now that I am only going to add a personal note...which I strongly feel I must. I had to wait for this movie to be released on DVD before I got to see it....having waited patiently since I first read it won awards at the Venice Film Festival.

I am so grateful that Peter Mullen took this project on and that it met with such controversy because that was exactly what was needed for the film to get recognized and viewed by as many people as possible. The more people who see the film the better! The wonderful advantage of having waited for the DVD release is that it came with the brilliant documentary, ‘Sex In A Cold Climate` which inspired the movie.

As a X-Roman Catholic and a survivor of what I refer to as my incarceration...an oppressive Catholic education/indoctrination by the Sisters Of Charity (1957-1958) and the Ursuline Sisters (1959-1969), both old orders of the Catholic Church originating in Europe. I can state with battle-scarred alacrity that behavior as depicted in this movie is not only factual but not nearly cruel enough to tell the true story. From my experience...the Nazi's must have taken lessons in depravity and wickedness from the Sisters Of Charity! These were old world religious orders with dogmas and superstitions that have not changed since Christ's time. The practitioners of this primitive cult like barbarism were mostly ignorant of anything resembling reason or logic not to mention...science. The comparisons to the Taliban is not all that far fetched. Of course there was one or two nuns who had an occasional bout of compassion, but they were not only a minority, they were also downcast within the system. I also realize that not all Catholic orders are of the same cloth as the strict Roman Catholic variety, but I was born into the Irish Catholic variety...one of the worst.

It took me years and a loving cheerful husband to undo the deep melancholia I felt from having grown up with this kind of repression. Now, as a middle aged adult my depression has amalgamated into a outspoken and healthy anger at a religious institution and church that has been allowed for millenniums to abuse it's power. The psychological methods employed by The Catholic establishment is so devoid of compassion and full of hate that had it still existed today in America it would be considered illegal. The only reason these zealot fanatics got away with their brutal treatment of innocent children for so long is because the people they tormented were brainwashed with eternity in hell for even thinking of questioning such God given authority. I spit on that authority!

This movie is not an exaggeration! And it's not restricted to the religious orders in Ireland. If anything it didn't go far enough in depicting the true story. Not enough nefariousness has been said of an institution that routinely turned it's eyes on child molestation and the persecution of women perpetrated by it's leaders. I am so glad that all these Catholic Church and School survivors are suing the church and therefore bringing the atrocities to light. And I applaud Peter Mullen for making such a forceful case against inhumanity in the name of organized religion of any flavor. Christian, Catholic, Islam, Jew...they're all the same...it's all about control and power...and too often it's an aberration of it's original intent.

The Magdelene Sisters is a good portrayal of the very real behaviour of nuns. I am English and emigrated to Canada with my family. I attended a catholic school which was run by these social misfits, and from my very first day, I was persecuted for the following crimes: I had a short hair cut, my hand writing was not neat, I did not know the words to the Canadian national anthem, I had an English accent, I was good at drawing, I failed to smile at the right time during assembly, I slipped on some ice in the school grounds and hurt myself. etc., etc., etc. I was hit countless times during my few months there - before I left the horrible place. I was constantly referred to as "the green horn Englishman",mocked and imitated because of my accent, and belittled because I didn't know the Canadian national anthem, which we were required to sing every morning before lessons began - (I'd only been in the country weeks - I soon learned it). I was kept behind after school regularly because my handwriting was "unacceptable", causing me to miss my bus home (I had a long way to travel). I was once hit across the back of my head with the words "you write like a boy, you talk like a boy - you even look like a boy". I was eight years old. My sister, who was ten, received remarkably similar treatment. I was terrified to tell my parents because I thought they would speak to the nuns and I would be worse off. Instead they thankfully took my sister and me out of school after she admitted what was going on. I have nothing but contempt for these people. I feel that anything which exposes them as they really are can only be of value to society, above all, for the protection of children.