Magadlene Sisters

‘Magdalene Sisters’ tells of sad time for unwed mothers

NORA-JANE MOON in “The Magdalene Sisters.”

If you like movies about crazy, sadistic nuns — and who doesn’t — you’ll love “The Magdalene Sisters.”
This 2002 film takes place in 1964. We follow three women, two of whom had out-of-wedlock children. One is by rape.
No matter. Their children are taken from them and they are ordered, indefinitely, to Magdalene Asylum for young women.
This fact-based film takes us into this distorted world where religion is used as an excuse for cruelty and torture.
For their transgressions — real or imagined — the women are ordered to hard labor, doing laundry by hand in a sink and trying to get the pesky stains out of the priests’ collars. Their sentences are indefinite.
They aren’t allowed to talk and must listen to scripture while eating. Breakfast consists of a type of gruel, while the nuns enjoy eggs and bacon on the other side of a partition.
The nuns like to whip backslides, rap knuckles and play games in which the women must stand nude and be humiliated. Nuns decide who has the largest and smallest breasts, among other attributes. I won’t go further with my examples.
These nuns are definitely on the sick side of the sacraments.
When the nuns aren’t putting the girls through hell, they use an elderly woman to monitor and tongue lash the girls. Her pay, an automatic entrance into heaven.
Before the movie is over, she learns if that is true or not.
The nuns also seem to have a penchant for cutting the hair of the most unruly girls, going so far as to bloody the eyebrows. Ouch!
The film may be based on fact, but it does seem to go over the top at times.
It has an almost cult-like, “Mommy Dearest” quality to it. I can see a theater full of patrons chanting “Cut that hair. Cut that hair!”
In one scene, a young woman escapes from the institution, only to have her father thrash her violently and then deliver her, bloody and bleeding, back to the asylum.
There is a sensitive scene in the film where one of the inmates, while hanging out clothes, sees her sister and young son gazing at her. But she dare not react, risking the ire of the nuns.
It’s difficult to believe there could be such cruelty to these young women.
Geraldine McEwan does an admirable job as the sadistic Sister Bridget.
Dorothy Duffy plays a pretty girl who ends up at the institution because the boys pay too much attention to her at the orphanage.
Nora-Jane Noone plays a girl who is brutally raped by her cousin. When the sobbing teen comes down to tell a woman what happens, the cousin is ushered to safety and she is taken to the asylum. Imagine, a rape victim!
Mary Murray has a child out of wedlock and is forced to sign papers giving the baby up for adoption. She immediately changes her mind and ends up at the asylum.
It’s a film that will stay with you
I would hazard a guess you won’t find this film on the Eternal Word Television Network.

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS
• Runtime: 119 minutes
• Directed and written by Peter Mullan
• Rated R for violence, cruelty, nudity, sexual content and language.