The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002)

As an actor, Peter Mullan has a wide oeuvre, but it's particularly his characterisation in Ken Loach's bleakly gritty My Name is Joe that seems to sum up the best of what he brings to a role, and so perhaps appropriate that as director he's so far ploughed a similar furrow of uncompromisingly harrowing real-life stories.
For all its well-meaning critical acclaim, though, The Magdalene Sisters is not his best. That it takes a few liberties in splicing together various real people to create a dramatic composite isn't the problem: the rub is, it's not dramatic enough. The history of the decades of cruelty of Ireland's nun-run Magdalene workhouses-come-prisons for women fallen by the wayside or undesirables just interned by their families has abundant potential, but Mullan's direction falls flat in its earnestness, the script containing little to surprise, also including Geraldine McEwan's stock sadistic Mother Superior. And if the quartet of girl-victims aren't actually biographical, do they need to be so gormless in their attempts to flee their plight?

5/10