Product Description

In 1964, four young women are banished to the Magdalene Sisterhood convent for sexual behavior, where they are abused and overworked doing laundry.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 7-SEP-2004
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11220 in DVD
• Brand: Unknown
• Released on: 2004-03-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Amazon.com
A movie guaranteed to make the blood boil, The Magdalene Sisters gives a lacerating account of life inside a Magdalene Laundry, one of the dismal asylums for "wayward women" run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Director Peter Mullan, inspired by a TV documentary on the same subject, follows the miserable fates of three young women who are institutionalized in the 1960s for flimsy reasons; their lives are at the mercy of sadistic nuns (Geraldine McEwan is superb as the head of the place). The film sounds tortuous, but its rich sense of outrage and excellent performances--Nora-Jane Noone is a real discovery--make it consistently gripping. The movie won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and went on to become a box-office hit in Ireland, where the Magdalene system was still a fresh memory. It had been abolished only in 1996. --Robert Horton

From The New Yorker
A scalding new picture from Peter Mullan, set in Ireland in the nineteen-sixties. Three girls are sent to a Magdalene Asylum-one of a network of institutions to which wayward young women were consigned by their disapproving families. The asylums were run by Roman Catholic nuns; in this case, the presiding spirit is Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), who counts her money in secret and speaks to her charges with a forked tongue. Finally, the trio of friends-played by Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy, and Nora-Jane Noone-make their escape, as if from a prisoner-of-war camp. The system was certainly crushing, but it has inspired Mullan-a fine actor, whose previous film as director, "Orphans," was a scabrous Glaswegian comedy-to deliver his most intemperate work, which lashes out at the Catholic Church with the same hardness of heart that Sister Bridget and her colleagues display in their running of the asylum. You come away from the movie not just convinced but cowed.-A.L. (8/11/03) -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Good
Brutally psychopathic lesbian nuns and lascivious pedophile priests. What else is new? No, seriously, watching the DVD of The Magdalene Sisters was like a time machine for me. Not that I was ever an unwed mother in an Irish hellhole run by religious extremists, but I did grow up in a poor neighborhood that was patrolled by reprobate and psychotic cops that made the bad cops in Serpico look virginal, by comparison. Those cops, as the nuns in the film, ruled by terror and brutality. People were assaulted and humiliated and denigrated for the least of reasons.
This film could have easily veered off track into a running anti-Catholic joke or screed, but its artistic `reality' is too levelheaded to allow that. Basically, last century in Ireland was a misogynist's utopia. Young women were horded off to laundries to do slave labor for the Roman Catholic church, under the guidance of nuns from the Magdalene sisterhood, whose hope was to redeem prostitutes, unwed mothers, and other `fallen girls'. The title is a play off this fact and three young women who are the stars of the film. Based upon real women, although for dramatic purposes their tales are condensed into the 1960s (the DVD's documentary Sex In A Cold Climate shows the women the lead characters were based on, and their age range varies over a quarter of a century). Why the 1960s and not the 1940s seems only to be for the belief among many artists that this was the last period of social justice in the world. The three girls represent different archetypes of `fallen women': the orphan and would be prostitute and sexual temptress Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), whose crime is flirting with boys at Catholic school; the unwed mother Rose- called Patricia by the nuns (Dorothy Duffy), whose child is taken away from her by her parents, and rape/incest victim Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), whose brutalizing by her cousin, is followed by her parents shipping away, until her younger brother- who cried out for her as she was taken away, comes to rescue her four years later.... The Catholic Church in Ireland condemned this 2003 film, which is no surprise, but given its problems with pedophile priests, does anyone watching this really believe the claims of sadistic lesbian nuns is NOT credible! That these Magdalene laundry camps were run until 1996 is amazing (in the worst sense), but all too emblemic of the evils of all religion- from the Crusades and Inquisitions, Martin Luther to Torquemada, the Conquistadores and the Taliban. Writer/director Peter Mullan never veers into caricature, which says alot, given the subject matter, and the acting is utterly superb. McEwan, as Sister Bridget, reeks wickedry like few characters in film history. Even Nurse Ratched, from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, seems kind-hearted by comparison. And this film is worlds better than a similarly-themed film from a few years ago, Girl, Interrupted, which seemed more like a chicks behind bars film. None of the actresses in The Magdalene Sisters are likely to become sex symbols, like the collagen lipped and breast enhanced Angelina Jolie. They are attractive, but real looking.

This film made me mad
I felt disgusted watching this film, yet was unable to turn it off. I was utterly amazed that these atrocities actually occured and very recently at that. This is a very serious movie about a serious subject matter. The actresses do an amazing job of portraying the victimized and imprisoned girls who get tortured in practically every way you can think of. The woman who plays the main nun is shockingly good and really makes you believe that there are true terrors in this world. Everyone should see this film, if only to learn something that I was only recently made aware of.

Shameful Chapter in Irish CHurch History
Three girls are sent separately to an institution run by nuns in 1960s Ireland to be reformed for sexual misbehavior.The opening sequences show each girl's individual circumstances and the incredibly unfair judgement in all three cases.

Once there they are subjected to a life of servitude and discipline that is rendered in the film as unbearably horrible. The girls adapt to their surroundings to a degree and the film becomes the story of how they struggle to retain some sense of independence and dignity in the repressive surroundings ruled over by a group of insensitive and sadistic nuns.

The Magdalene laundry's that were run as a sort of a reformatory system for wayward girls was an aspect of Irish Catholic history that was not well known to me and it is revealed in this story as a seriously abusive and embarrassing chapter in the history of the Church in Ireland.

The film is tightly put together with barely a wasted scene and the acting is superb. From the opening wedding sequence you have the sense that this will be different and the film does not disappoint. Nora Jane Noone's performance stands out but the entire cast is very good.