Director: Tim Mielants
Released: November 2024
We were drawn to this Irish movie mainly to see Cillian Murphy in his first movie role after his impressive Oscar-winning portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, Oppenheimer.
After watching the first 15 minutes, it was clear this was a very different kind of movie; a slow burn, ponderous exploration of a man’s emotional struggle to come to terms with his discovery of disturbing secrets kept by the local convent as he reconciles them with the awkward truths about his own upbringing.
The film is based on the Booker Prize shortlisted novella of the same name by Claire Keegan, with a screenplay by Enda Walsh (no relation to Eileen Walsh) and direction by Tim Mielants.
Synopsis
The film is set in 1985 somewhere in Ireland, and opens homing in on Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a devoted father who lives with his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and his five daughters in modest conditions. He runs a coal distribution business, delivering sacks of coal to locals, including the convent where he notices an emotionally distressing scene of a girl protesting her banishment to the institution by her equally distressed family. On another occasion he wanders into the convent seeking payment for his coal delivery and is confronted by one of the girl inmates who pleads with him to help her escape, which he refuses.
Bill’s soft side is also exposed when he feels sorry for and generously hands over his loose change to a young boy from a local farming household with an alcoholic father whom he sees wandering around gathering firewood. When he later tells his wife Eileen about this encounter, she chastises him for his weakness and for meddling with others’ domestic affairs.
Bill’s ritual cleaning of his hands to rid himself of the coal stains from work whenever he steps into his home after work becomes a symbol and scourge of his troubled past which he so wants to but can never fully erase, no matter how hard he scrubs. It also offers the cinematic opportunity for his mind to wander off into flashbacks.
The financial challenges of preparing for the current Christmas festive season also triggers Bill’s recollection of his own childhood. Through these indulgent and intermittent flashbacks, we see young Bill (Louis Kirwan) living with his mother Sarah Furlong (Agnes O’Casey) in widowed Mrs Wilson’s (Michele Fairley) household. There’s a young man Ned (Mark McKenna) hanging around them, who seems to be another of Sarah’s co-workers on the Wilson estate. Ned has an affinity for and clearly looks out for both Sarah and Bill.
The plot thickens
Things take a dark turn when, on one of his early dawn deliveries to the convent, Bill finds a girl shivering and hiding in the cold coal shed. Wondering how she ended up there, and eager to remove her from such an inhospitable environment, he convinces the young girl to head back with him into the convent where he is invited for tea by Sister Mary (Emily Watson) who heads the whole operation. The frightened young girl, Sarah (Zara Devlin), joins them for tea and cake, and appears to be coerced into lying that she was sent to the coal house by her fellow inmates as part of a game. Of course, Bill suspects this is a cover up by Sarah (who shares his mother’s name) to save herself more trauma and Sister Mary makes a show of forgiving the girl’s indulgence in playing games, excusing her from the day’s labour so she can rest and recover from her traumatic and sleepless night in the cold.
Despite Bill’s assurances that he and his family of 6 women are fine and doing well, Sister Mary makes a cruel dig at what must be his disappointment in life, not having a son to carry on his family name. Bill’s rebellious streak emerges as he counters her by declaring that there was nothing to be ashamed of, when he carries his mother’s surname which wasn’t such a bad thing. Sister Mary then settles her debt for the coal deliveries when Bill presents her with his invoice. However, her uncharacteristic generosity in offering a special financial gift to Bill’s wife Emily is when we see her devious charm at play. She’s blatantly trying to buy his silence after having exposed her institution’s shamefully cruel treatment of the girls.
Bill accepts the bribe but can’t bring himself to hand over the envelope with card and cash to his wife, presumably so as not to become complicit in their wrongdoing. But it is Sister Mary herself who then seals the deal by reporting the incident to Eileen who then confronts Bill and asks for the envelope. Right on cue, both Eileen and her friend (who runs the local pub and hears about his encounter with Sister Mary), both demand that Bill keep his head down and not rock the boat. They remind him of the repercussions should Sister Mary’s overbearing influence on the community come to bear negatively on the family, potentially even depriving the Furlong girls an education at the school, also run by the nuns.
We also see Bill checking in on his eldest girl who works in his business, as she starts to interact with boys. Obviously concerned that she might inadvertently be bullied or taken advantage of in all her innocent vulnerability, the devoted father insists that she can turn to him should she ever find herself in trouble.
Will the effects of the convent’s oppressive grip on everyone’s life, including Bill’s own past, allow him to continue to look the other way? We eventually find out when the film ends.
Frustration and shock
It’s hard to believe that inhumane scenes like these were still happening in the Irish Republic as recently as the mid-80s. That even with the advent of the coloured television bringing a liberated social worldview into each and every household across Ireland, what must have been quite a common occurrence—i.e. someone getting “knocked up” out of wedlock—could not be dealt with other than a knee-jerk reaction of banishment to a living-hell-on-earth, to be never to be spoken about again and conveniently swept out of sight to avoid stigma and shame, condemned to a life of misery and cruelty in a money-making business run by the church. Was this not a case of slavery; to banish a young woman to the lowest caste, subjected to physical and verbal abuse, driven to hard labour and harsh living conditions for the rest of her life to financially enrich her “owners” for an alleged crime she was judged and condemned for without a fair trial?
As the saying goes: It takes a village to raise a child. But the reality is that it also takes the tacit complicity of a whole village and collective will of the community to perpetuate a social atrocity of such magnitude.
If an unwanted pre-marital pregnancy was a women’s crime, then where was the man’s role in contributing to it and why was he not similarly held accountable for that crime? Is it the woman’s plight and an unfair one that she bears the entire brunt of a mutually consented sexual act or, worse still, an unwelcomed attack – just because she alone manifests the physical outcome of such an act or attack? Where is the justice in this approach to dealing with a socially forbidden activity that must involve both a woman and a man?
Related material - The Magdalene Sisters
The Irish documentary film titled Sex in a Cold Climate was released in 1998. It detailed the sordid mistreatment of “fallen women” in what were known as the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. It was produced and directed by Steve Humphries and narrated by Dervla Kirwan. It was then used as source material for the 2002 film, The Magdalene Sisters with testimonies featured in the documentary forming the basis for characters in the dramatised film.
The thought-provoking film was about four young women who, in 1994 and under tragic circumstances, found themselves banished to one of these Magdalene asylums. It was just one of many similar institutions across the country run by nuns of Roman Catholic orders which were effectively workhouses for penitent young women labelled as “fallen” by their families and society at large.
Plot of The Magdalene Sisters film
The film, directed by Peter Mullan, presents the stories of four young women who are forced by their families or caretakers into the Magdalene asylum. There’s Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) who had been raped by her cousin, Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) who was an orphan who was also just too beautiful and coquettish, Rose (Dorothy Duffy) who was an unmarried mother and Crispina (Eileen Walsh) who had an intellectually disabled and was also an unmarried mother. They were essentially young women summarily punished for behaviour that wasn’t necessarily criminal, nor were they solely responsible for.
Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), the Mother Superior who runs the outfit is a twisted, monstrous sadist who, despite her gentle-faced appearance and outwardly soft-spoken demeanour, takes pleasure in inflicting corporal punishment on the girls living in squalid conditions. Despite having undertaken vows of chastity and depriving themselves of pleasures of the flesh, the nuns who liken themselves to Mary Magdalene (the prostitute and biblical patroness of “wayward women”) get to enjoy good food while the working girls subsist on meagre oatmeal porridge. And like the repentant Mary Magdalene, the fallen penitent girls also had to reject their sexuality in order for their souls to be saved.
The scandal gets worse when the nuns allow the resident priest, Father Fitzroy (Daniel Costello) to have his way sexually abusing Crispina. While the other three girls end up managing to escape their horrific situation when a variety of external interventions conspire to allow them to leave, poor Crispina is less fortunate. Having been sent to a mental institution, to silence her from revealing the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of Father Fitzroy, she ends up dying of anorexia at the age of 24.
Magdalene Laundries
The Magdalene asylums across Ireland were also known as Magdalene Laundries. They were commercial laundries, initially Protestant institutions but eventually mostly run by Roman Catholic orders, which relied on the forced labour of young women and operated from the 18th into the late 20th centuries. Given the inhumane torture and cruelty they perpetuated, it was ironic that these orders had names like Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters.
They existed ostensibly to house “fallen women“, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined in these institutions across the country. These institutions were meant to serve as refuges and workhouses for outcast, unwed mothers. But it wasn’t just girls who fell pregnant but sometimes girls accused of being too pretty, flirtatious and perceived as seductresses who were also locked up against their will.
When the unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries in 1973, this led to media revelations about the operations of the secretive institutions, which were eventually exposed as places where much abuse—whether mental, physical and even sexual—occurred.
A formal state apology was subsequently issued by the Irish Government in 2013. Accepting its role in funding and condoning such treatment perpetuated through these historic institutions, the government also established a compensation scheme for survivors, which by 2022 and after an extension of the scheme had paid out €32.8 million to 814 survivors. Despicably, the religious orders which operated the laundries and were implicated in the atrocities have refused to contribute financially to the program, rejecting appeals by victims and Ireland’s Justice Minister to make reparations for their shocking past actions.
Demise of the Magdalene Laundries
Given Ireland’s historically conservative sexual values, dictated by a very influential Roman Catholic Church, the Magdalen asylums were seen as a generally accepted social institution well into the second half of the twentieth century. They eventually disappeared with evolving sexual mores and a loss of faith in the Catholic Church due to repeated revelations of scandals.
Historian Frances Finnegan, however, suggests that a more critical reason is that these laundries ceased to be profitable: “Possibly the advent of the washing machine has been as instrumental in closing these laundries as have changing attitudes.”
What an indictment, that it wasn’t just a case of society’s values progressing to rid itself of such a blight than it took the cold pragmatism of unviable economics to eventually hasten the shutting down of these exploitative, barbaric, cruel, dehumanising social institutions.
Takeaways from the film
And therein lies the success of this movie in capturing the essence of collective oppression, underpinned by a complicity of a community so griped by a force that compels them to look the other way while such atrocities occurred under their noses. It is an inexplicably shameful phenomenon, where such mass wilful blindness would ensure that the lives of some young women would be irretrievably ruined and sent to a living hell on earth. And this went on right into the 1980s.
Rather than to focus on the why and how such cruelty could have continued for so long, perhaps it is the deliberate intention of this piece, both the book and film adaptation, to provide a glimpse of what it is to feel for those subjected to the oppression and trauma of the situation and their acts of bravery and small things like these, which are the key to eventually breaking the cycle.
"Falling" pregnant
While I’d always used the expressing becoming or getting pregnant, I was surprised to hear this alternative expression “falling pregnant” which is a typical one used in Australia and parts of the UK. Why should something generally deemed to be a blessing such as becoming pregnant be referred to in such a negative way? A woman could get or become pregnant either willingly or unwillingly, with or without the consent or collaboration of a man. So why is this something she must “fall” into?
Perhaps if men (and society at large) understood and accepted the consequences of their actions, we would all stop using this archaic and silly form of expression to describe a woman’s situation when she is with child.
But the problem continues
We live in tumultuous times, where the cycle of oppression and freedom continues, aided in contemporary times by the social media and networks against a backdrop of opportunistic political regimes. Despite the access to so much information and knowledge afforded by a supposedly open world-wide-web, we nevertheless find ourselves so readily manipulated by deliberate misinformation, peer pressure and nationalistic or religious allegiances to be wilfully blind to such atrocities and social abuses occurring under our collective noses.
With the awful situation emerging in the USA, where women’s rights to control their own bodies are being steadily rolled back, with laws in more than half the states insisting through ridiculous laws that a woman having become pregnant from a rape must carry the pregnancy to full term, as if it were her due punishment for having caused the rape.
The only way to resist falling into such traps of compliance is through personal acts of braveness, consciously maintaining one’s objectivity and discernment, and to have empathy for those being persecuted, assuming you might eventually become one yourself without even realising it!
Movie trailer
Cillian Murphy with director Tim Mielants
Other reviews
Magdalene Sisters trailer (2002)
Sex in a Cold Climate (1998)
Other works
about Magdalene asylums:
BOOKS
- A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church State Power in Ireland by Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell & Maeve O’Rourke (2023)
- Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries by Maureen Sullivan (2023)
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)
- The Best Catholics in the World by Derek Scally (2021)
- Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s Institutions for ‘Fallen Women’ by Caelainn Hogan (2019)
- The Cruelty Men by Emer Martin (2018)
- My Name is Bridget: The Untold Story of Bridget Dolan and the Tuam Mother and Baby Home by Alison O’Rielly (2018)
- Our Lady of Charity in Ireland: The Monastries, Magdalen Asylums, and Reformatory Schools,1853-1973 by Jacinta Pruny (2017)
- The Magdalen Girls by VS Alexander (2016)
- Whispering Hope: The True Story of the Magdalene Women by Steven O’Riordan, Nancy Costello, Kathleen Legg, Diane Croghan, Marie Slattery, Marina Gambold, Sue Leonard, etc (2015)
- Origins of the Magdalene Laundries: An Analytical History by Rebecca Lea McCarthy (2010)
- The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and a Fifty-year Search by Martin Sixsmith (2009)
- Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940 by Maria Luddy (2007)
- Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment by James M Smith (2007)
- Don’t Ever Tell: Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne (2005)
- Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland by Frances Finnegan (2001)
FILMS, TV SERIES & DOCOS - IMDB links
- Small Things Like These – film directed by Tim Mielants (2024)
- The Woman in the Wall – TV series (2023)
- Stolen – documentary by Margo Harkin (2023)
- Ireland’s Dirty Laundry – documentary directed by Gerry Gregg (2022)
- Ann – film by Ciaran Creagh (2022)
- The Missing Children – documentary by Tanya Stephan (2021)
- Ireland’s Mother and Baby Scandal – documentary by Callum Macrae (2020)
- Philomena – film directed by Stephen Frears (2013)
- The Forgotten Maggies – documentary by Steven O’Riordan (2009)
- Song for a Raggy Boy – film by Aisling Walsh (2003)
- The Magdalene Sisters – directed by Peter Mullan (2002)
- Sinners – TV movie by Aisling Walsh (2002)
- Sex in a Cold Climate – documentary by Steve Humphries (1998)
