Imagine a society that sentences females, sans trial, to long yet undefined incarcerations for their involvement in incredibly insignificant infractions.  Imagine that they're forced to perform hard labor in horrible conditions for no wages and are emotionally blackmailed to the point that their very existence involves the ongoing destruction of self-worth.  And imagine that the prisoners are forbidden to speak to each other and are occasionally stripped naked and individually mocked for having the smallest boobs, the hairiest twat or the fattest ass.

Aside from the last part sounding a bit like the Howard Stern Show, you would probably assume the description above is either from something that regularly occurred during the Dark Ages, or perhaps more recently at the hands of Muslim extremists in the Middle East.  Well, you'd be wrong – this kind of thing was happening as recently as 1996 at Catholic Church-run Magdalene Asylums in Ireland.  Hey, who said there were no similarities between hardcore Catholics and the Taliban?

The asylums, run by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order, were brutal reformatories/lucrative laundry services that began in the late 1800s and were eventually phased out when the popularity of the washing machine made them an unprofitable enterprise.  During their run, the asylums gobbled up some 30,000 young women, who theoretically were there to wash their "sins" down the drain with soapy, gray water.

After watching Sex in a Cold Climate, a television documentary about the little-known Magdalene Asylums, Scottish actor Peter Mullan decided the story needed to be told.  So he wrote and directed The Magdalene Sisters, a heartbreakingly bleak picture that won the Golden Lion in Venice as well as the Discovery Award in Toronto.  Mullan's work, set in 1964 Dublin County, is fantastically grim, so there aren't any bullshit sunbeams to warm your heart, like the similarly anti-nun crapfest Evelyn.  Aside from adding a wicked and almost cartoonish HNIC (head nun in charge) that could give Nurse Ratched a run for her money, Mullan is able to tell the important tale without being totally exploitive and heavy-handed.

Mullan, who has appeared mostly in indie films like My Name is Joe, The Claim and Trainspotting, really nails the opening of Sisters, which shows how its three main characters end up in the care of the Magdalene nuns. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) had the gall to be raped by a cousin at a family wedding.  Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) committed the ultimate sin of sprouting breasts and becoming attractive to the opposite sex.  Rose (Dorothy Duff) had a baby, which was pretty much yanked out of her and immediately stuck in an orphanage.

The girls are put in the charge of Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), the aforementioned HNIC, and the rest is...well, it's pretty damn depressing stuff.  Understandably, Sisters has incurred the ire of the Catholic Church, which is already reeling from the whole boy-buggering thing.  Mullan does a very good job at capturing the wacky power Catholicism wielded over Ireland, and despite working with mostly inexperienced young actresses, is able to do so in a fresh way that doesn't evoke memories of Rabbit-Proof Fence (too dull + bad acting), The Pianist (too long + tired story) or that seemingly endless supply of Iranian films portraying the plight of their women (too many + too similar).

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for violence/cruelty, nudity, sexual content and language