MOVIES: A REAL-LIFE HORROR

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By Cathleen McGuigan

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A teen girl is raped and her family has her locked up in a prison. This sounds like life in a developing country ruled by religious extremists, but such events took place in modern-day Ireland. The harrowing new film "The Magdalene Sisters" follows four women in the 1960s who are committed to a Roman Catholic asylum in Dublin, where they work as slave labor in a laundry, brutalized psychologically and physically by the nuns who mean to save their souls. The movie, condemned by the Vatican after it won the Venice Film Festival last fall, has already stirred audiences in Ireland. But on the eve of its opening here, the American branch of the Sisters of Mercy--one of the orders that ran the asylums--issued an unusual statement. The asylums "represent a time in the history of the Catholic Church... of which we are not proud... we grieve with all victims of the Magdalene Laundries." At least 30,000 women were inmates from the mid-19th century until the last asylum closed in 1996. Though the characters are fictitious, says filmmaker Peter Mullan, the incidents are true. Frances Finnegan, a social historian in Ireland, concurs. "In many ways," she says, "the reality was worse."

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