What does a flirty teenage orphan girl, an unwed mother, a mentally disabled woman and a rape victim have in common? They share institutionalized victim blaming, misogyny and families that condemned them to potentially a lifetime of abuse in The Magdalene Sisters. The Magdalene Sisters is set in the not so distant past of Ireland at The Magdalene Asylums or The Magdalene Laundries, which were run by the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine jail with no due process because you are a woman, and as a woman, you have or may commit a sexual sin. The guards are a sexually abusive priest and nuns, some of whom were former inmates who joined the order as the only way to escape the mental and physical torture. The outside world just considers you a bunch of whores so getting help is unlikely unless you have a sympathetic relative, which may be unlikely because it is usually your relatives that put you there in the first place.
The Magdalene Sisters is a masterpiece because it shows and does not tell. The Magdalene Sisters primarily follows four characters, three of whom the viewer sees before she is placed in the asylum. The supporting characters, older mentally ill inmates and a young woman who ran away, shows what the main characters’ futures will be like if they stay any longer. Each woman arrives as a kind, caring, empathetic, docile woman, but as the years accumulate, the abuse takes its toll. They become cruel, desperate and rebellious. One girl decides that if she is going to be seen as a whore, she may as well use sexual favors to get out. Even if they escape, they will all have bitterness, anger and outrage to remember the place.
There is one harrowing scene where a woman could escape, but she understandably does not trust the stranger that she encounters to help get her to safety. If her family could victimize her, what would a stranger do to her?
I know that you may be thinking, “Do I really need to see ANOTHER movie about how abusive the Catholic Church was?” Yes, you do. The Magdalene Sisters illustrates attitudes towards women that still exist today even if they are no longer a part of the Roman Catholic Church’s institutional framework. These places only closed in the 1990s. Doesn’t our society still treat rape victims like they did something wrong? Don’t we treat single mothers like they have committed some unprecedented sin and treat their children like an unwanted burden and inconvenience, but simultaneously discourage women from having abortions because it is murder? When a woman is pretty and attracts attention, even if she is young girl, don’t we blame her for distracting boys? Instead of deriding the Catholic Church for taking these attitudes to the abusive and exploitative extreme, castigate yourself for keeping these attitudes alive. The Magdalene Sisters is a must see film that is actually fairly hard to find. I wonder why.