The Magdalene Sisters (15)

The sisters grim

Peter Mullan's incendiary new film, The Magdalene Sisters, has already made headlines for provoking the Vatican, and thereby earned itself a pre-release reputation that would be the envy of any publicity department. The film lands some well-aimed blows on the Catholic Church in general, and on nuns in particular, but let no one assume that they're the only offenders. A whole society is on trial here, an Ireland of not very distant memory in which social, familial and moral hypocrisy combined to banish innocent young women to a lifetime of servitude and lovelessness. Dickens could hardly have rendered these stolen lives more piteous.

Grim as it is, however, the film doesn't scruple to find a wintry kind of comedy within the dark. While the tone of Mullan's bold debut Orphans (1999) kept seesawing between tragedy and farce, The Magdalene Sisters commits itself to a realism whose horror feels a mere breath away from absurdity. It is the only word to describe an incarceration where the inmates are guilty of no crime yet are subjected to slave labour, forbidden contact with the outside world and overseen by an order of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy. The year of its setting is 1964, recent enough to make you wonder: how can this be happening? Weren't the Sixties meant to be swinging? The only thing swinging in the Magdalene Asylum is the arm of Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) as she canes two poor miscreants for speaking out of turn. Caning is a let-off; for those girls who really cause a nuisance – by trying to escape, for example – the Sister administers a haircut that makes the scalp bleed. "You won't be running away now, will you?" she says.

Writer-director Mullan focuses upon a trio of girls as representative victims of the Magdalene system (an estimated 30,000 women and girls went through it). Again, their innocence is a heart-rending absurdity. Rose (Dorothy Duffy), already pressured to give up her illegitimate child for adoption, is handed over to the Church's authority by her shamefaced parents. Orphaned schoolgirl Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is carted off simply because she's been making eyes at boys across the way from Saint Attracta's (Is that really a saint's name, or Mullan's jaundiced invention?). Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is at the centre of the film's bravura opening sequence; after she has been raped by a cousin at a family wedding, Mullan's camera cuts from face to face as whisper of the scandal spreads and a priest is called in to mediate, though the only sound to be heard is the wild thrum of an Irish jig. Here is neatly encapsulated the extremes of the Irish character: hearty gregariousness and heartless moral repression. The priests and nuns were the ones who doled out the abuse, but it was the Catholic family's sense of shame that gave them the authority. Personally, I blame the parents.

What the film goes on to dramatise very poignantly is the meekness with which most of the girls accept their fate. So cowed are they by the Asylum's strict regimen and the consciousness of their own stained souls that resistance never seems to occur to them; the camera frames their silent scrubbing and mopping and laundering as something like the toils of the damned. A notable exception to this docility is Bernadette, though her resolve is twisted into a brutish survival instinct that rides roughshod over more simple-minded inmates like Crispina (Eileen Walsh, starkly memorable). Bernadette's determination to escape is a reminder, if one were needed, that what we're really watching is a prison movie. True, there aren't guns and barbed wire, but the girls' rough brown dresses are prison duds, the nuns are warders and Sister Bridget is as scary as any prison governor seen in movies.

Geraldine McEwan's marvellous performance is all tight smiles and cruel mockery, and the white scrum-cap she wears (a little like Daniel Day-Lewis's in Gangs of New York) gives her pinched features a faintly extraterrestrial air. The balance to her sadism is sentimentality, expressed in tears as she watches one of her favourite "fillums", The Bells of St Mary's – the story of a nun's ennobling self-sacrifice.

It is perhaps in the nature of such a film that its polemical fire occasionally rages out of control. At meal-times the contrast between the miserable scraps on the girls' plates and the bounty on the nuns' linen-clothed table is too pointed; you half-expect some hollow-cheeked waif to creep up to the front and hold out a bowl asking for more. Mullan makes a subtler point later on in a brief, understated glimpse of the dinner routine, the girls droning through a lengthy grace while the food in front of them grows cold. He sometimes can't resist capping the point: after we spy the Asylum chaplain being fellated by Crispina, the next scene cuts to her kneeling before the same priest at the altar rail, this time opening her mouth to receive a communion wafer. Did we need the prompt that the poor girl has had an extra helping of flesh?

Such lapses are pardonable when set against the scenes and moments that Mullan nails with a real director's confidence. It will be hard to forget the look of dreadful misery on the girls' faces, for instance, as a beefy nun conducts a nude inspection and roars with mirth at the differing sizes of breasts and backsides. Mullan's point is that the nun doesn't even mean to be cruel – she actually becomes huffy when the girls fail to join in the laughter. Here as elsewhere, the failure is one of imagination, an inability to enter into the suffering of somebody other than oneself. That such a failure happened within the context of a faith supposed to prize humility and compassion is the transfixing irony of this powerfully indignant picture.