DRAMA; 1hr 37min
STARRING: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Emily Watson
Dark nights: Murphy
Billed as a refuge for the “penance and rehabilitation” of “fallen” — aka single and pregnant — women, Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, as operated by the Catholic Church, were in reality a hotbed of abuse for the tens of thousands of miserable souls who were banished there from 1922 to the late 1990s.
Coal merchant Bill Furlong (Murphy, emoting like the clappers, primarily in silence) is unaware of any of this as he goes about his delivery business in the lead-up to Christmas 1985. Bill has enough piled on his plate as it is: although a good man with a loyal wife (Walsh) and five bouncy daughters, he is cursed with unhappy childhood memories that plague him by day and leave him sleepless by night. It’s a burden that grows a damned sight heavier when he walks into the innocuous looking local Magdalene convent to discover a desperate inmate (Zara Devlin) held captive in a freezing shed.
Although spared the indignities of poverty when taken in by a wealthy woman (Michelle Fairley) after his single mother’s death, Bill has internalised injuries that instinctively attune him to the suffering of others. The anguish of the Magdalene girls is as present to him as his own, despite the best efforts of their crafty Mother Superior (Watson), who papers the cracks in her establishment’s grimy facade with the sinister ease of a Mafia don.
Director Tim Mielants and screenwriter Enda Walsh’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella frames a rural Ireland that is glacial and grey, the convent at its centre a sterile telescoping of misery. As insidious as he now understands the nuns to be, Bill is unable to shake the outrage he has witnessed. Torn between the ungodly truth of what they’re all up to and the urging of those around him to disregard it for his family’s protection, his only recourse in the end is to do what he knows to be right.
