The Magdalene Sisters

I really don't know why this movie received the Golden Lion. I can see the pros: it is an emotional story, astutely directed by Mullan and intensely acted by the cast. Period. But let me give you the cons: 1) the story is exaggerated: while every single episode may be likely or even true, the way they are put together makes the story doubtful; 2) characters lack depth, especially the sisters: they seem one-dimensional puppets, who don't have any traits except their main vice (be it greed, sadism, stupidity and so on); 3) photography is always dull, surely in order to give you the feeling of a prison. But in the few scenes outside the prison it's dull all the same, so maybe something is wrong; 4) there's no attempt to give a critical appraisal: the movie simply piles it on. The director looks like he doesn't care for your mind, he simply wants to hit you in the stomach. And he gets there all the time; 5) last but not least, the story is so schematic that it is misleading and ideological: nothing is good in the world of the movie. Church=bad, males=bad, society=bad. It's the kind of bad propaganda we could hear in Cold War years. One is led to wonder what another director could have done with such shocking material: the fate of those 30.000 victims of ignorance and prejudice should have deserved something more. As I said, it is a great delusion.

Cruelty, cruelty, and more cruelty may make for an interesting or compelling story, but it doesn't necessarily make good art. The nuns -- especially the head nun -- was not even a portrait of a human being. She was just evil incarnate. Not interesting. Perhaps the only good thing about the movie is that it fuels my disdain for the Catholic Church, of which I am an escapee. Thank goodness!

I really wanted to like this film, really. But it simply didn't work for me. The acts depicted in this film are shocking and utterly despicable and there have undoubtedly been serious wrongs in these monasteries; the film itself however falls flat on its stomach. ALL of the characters simply are caricatures of themselves, even the girls. And the story is nothing more than one sadistic act after another. Shocking? Yes. But after watching this film, what happened seems barely believable, because of the afore-mentioned reasons. And I don't think that's what they meant to do here. What a pity. 5/10

In Ireland in the 60's, three young women, one of them raped by her cousin, the second one a single mother and the third one a flirting and rebel student, are sent by their parents to the Magdalene Sisters Asylum. Although being administrated by nuns, they find exploitation, forced labor, sexual abuse, sadism, all the sort of maleficence in the place. First of all, I would like to explain that I am not religious, but I did not like this movie. In the cover of the DVD, it is written that this story is based on true facts. In the end of the movie, it is explained that 30,000 Irish girls were sent to places like this asylum called laundry, and the last "laundry" in Ireland was closed in 1996. However, this overrated movie seems to me very exaggerated and manipulative, with many insinuations of greed, sexual abuse and unusual situations, since the place looks like a prison, or a concentration camp, and the nuns look like the character "Ilsa" in a convent. The performances are excellent, but the story is similar to a common movie of women prison, showing all the usual sadism, only this time "in the name of God". My vote is seven. Title (Brazil): "Em Nome de Deus" ("In the Name of God")

'The Magdalene Sisters' would be a preposterous story, were it not factual. The actual names and circumstances appear to have been changed for the screenplay, but the original 50-minute documentary, filmed likely in the mid 1990s, tells us that everything, and more, happened to these children, virtually imprisoned for such things as having a child out of wedlock, or being sexually assaulted, or simply happening to look pretty. With no way out, they were forced to work long hours for no pay, operating the Magdalene Sisters' commercial laundry business, the last one until 1996. As one character, the old nun, explains, a strong Ireland requires that its men remain strong, so we have to remove temptation. The critic Ebert has a complete review. The only relevant "extra" on the DVD is the documentary, which features old photos and film, plus remarkable interviews with ladies who had been in a Magdalene Sisters asylum in the 1940s through the 1960s, including the three ladies around whom the movie's three main characters were built. A very gripping movie, well-acted.