Reflections on Magdalene Sisters (2002)
Content warning: this essay discusses abuse, so please do take care if choosing to read.
The Magdalene laundries were founded in 1765 in Ireland. They were created for women who didn’t conform to the rigid standards of an extremely religious society who were consequently detained under the Catholic church’s authority. This included sex workers, women who were raped and women became pregnant outside of marriage. To the church, these were “fallen women” and needed to redeem themselves and be “respectable”. Whilst detained, many women endured horrific abuse of all kinds at the hands of the nuns and priests who were supposedly “redeeming” them; many women lived out most of their lives in these laundries. The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996.
Many years have passed between my two viewings of Peter Mullan’s engrossing film on the topic, The Magdalene Sisters. I recall it being a disturbing watch as a young man. Now going headlong into my forties, its power is undiminished; its anger even more clear-eyed or, maybe, more clear to a (slightly) more mature adult. Mullan’s rage on behalf of those who survived and died in the now-notorious laundries drips off the screen.
Between my two viewings, I have had indirect experiences with the film’s broader concern of abuse in care. Throughout my thirties I worked in social care. While I did not work with those detained in the Magdalene laundries, I have worked directly with survivors of historical abuse in care. I have heard many disclosures of neglect and emotional, physical and sexual abuse from vulnerable people who were at the mercy of the church and local authority. As survivors of the Magdalene laundries have attested, what is shown and implied in Magdalene Sisters is only the tip of the iceberg for the horrors some experienced.
On rewatch, the film brought back some incredibly strong feelings. An anger at the pure injustice and, possibly, prodding some latent vicarious trauma from absorbing survivors’ stories. I only mention this to give my responses to the film some context. Naturally, any reaction of mine is minimal compared to the impact on survivors and their families.
Magdalene Sisters is, aesthetically, unflashy and uncomplicated. As Mullan stated in a BBC interview, he used “a simple way of shooting... to let the power come from the actors and not to draw the audience's attention to the camerawork”. There is no plot as such. From the same interview: “I'm not a huge fan of the three act structure, because it insists on a hero or heroine at the centre. I figured that the story would be more like a series of diaries that I had stumbled across and that the entire film would be from the point of view of the girls”. This uncluttered style means the performances can speak for themselves, acting as a conduit for survivors’ stories. All the actors rise to the challenge with convincing, raw and nuanced work. The scenes of abuse are direct and shocking.
Despite the authorial distance Mullan takes with this material, there is artistic intent is to illustrate something more than the abuse and the day-to-day life in the laundry. Magdalene Sisters is unambiguous in illustrating the social and political structures that facilitate these horrors. Cooperating patriarchal institutions work against these women before they even set foot in a laundry. This is made painfully clear in the protagonists’ backstories. Margaret’s (Anne-Marie Duff) cousin rapes her at a party. When he is outed for his behaviour, the camera shifts around the party from Margaret’s perspective: men pointing at her, speaking out of her earshot, openly staring at her, before the authorities are called to ensure her silence. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has a child out of marriage and the adoption services are right there to take her baby away with the complicity of her family. Her father holds her back from pursuing those taking her newborn before she is removed to the laundry. In a particularly intense scene, a father (Mullan) forces his absconding daughter back into the laundry. She cries and begs to come home. He says “you’ve murdered your mother and father” before turning to the other women and snarling “what are you whores looking at?” The barriers before these women seem insurmountable. Isolation, marginalisation and abuse seep from all the structures that are supposed to care for them. There is no possibility legal recourse. For most, the notion of being saved becomes an impossibility. For perceived ‘sins’, aided by the people they trusted, these women are forcefully placed and kept in the hands of laundries.
There is a profit motive for this detainment too. When we first see the Mother Superior Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) she is counting money from the laundry services, profiteering from the effective slave labour of these captive women. The abyss between have and have-nots are neatly illustrated at breakfast time, when the girls subsist on porridge but the nuns gorge on full breakfasts.
The film explicitly illustrates a structural, oppressive relationship between religion and patriarchy. In a small but key moment, perhaps the film’s most tragic figure Crispina (Eileen Walsh) is witnessed giving oral sex to a priest. In the next scene, the same priest is seen placing communion bread as “the body of Christ” on her tongue. The parallels are clear. In the toxic relationship between religion, patriarchy and capital, sexual abuse and religious ritual amount to the same thing – ways to exploit, control and silence women.
Magdalene Sisters understands that this silence is a hugely damaging aspect of the abuse. The not being believed. Decades of being gaslit by powerful, abusive institutions. The church doing whatever it could to defend itself. The history was mostly buried, Mullan himself inspired to make the film from a 1998 documentary Sex In A Cold Climate. Films such as these are part of breaking that silence. Redress was incredibly slow to come to survivors. The Irish government did not create an official system for redress until 2013. 11 years after the film was made, 15 years after the documentary, 17 years after the last laundry was closed, nearly 250 years since the first one opened.
But in showing some of the daily abuse these women endured, and illustrating the systems that aided and abetted that abuse, Magdalene Sisters is a strong case for art being a small but powerful tool for justice.