Monica Dolan delivers a superb performance as Catherine Corless in The Lost Children of Tuam, a deeply serious film about the mass graves uncovered at a mother and baby home run by nuns in Tuam, County Galway. Produced by Liam Neeson and based on a 2017 New York Times article, the drama is a painful, devastating retelling of a tragedy that saw up to 796 babies discarded, some in an old sewage tank.
A devastating discovery
The film feels scraped clean of anything unnecessary that might trivialise, fiction-ise or movie-ise what happened at St Mary's, home to thousands of unmarried women and children between 1925 and 1961. Corless, an amateur historian, turns detective after starting a course in local history, prompted by the comment: "It gets me out of the house."
Her research reveals that babies died at a rate of nearly one a fortnight at the home, from whooping cough, measles, malnutrition and other childhood illnesses. She eventually obtains nearly 800 death certificates but cannot find burial records for the babies; there are no graves.
Hard to look away
It is usual to say that a film like this is a difficult watch, but in fact it is the opposite: hard to look away. Dolan is excellent as Corless, who does most of her research at her kitchen table and is ill at ease in the spotlight when the media finally picks up the story.
Just as compelling are the actors playing the survivors, neglected and abused by nuns as children, now in their late middle age. Some only appear for a matter of moments, but their faces stay with the viewer. There is no exhilaration at the end, no comforting sense of closure, just pain.
The Lost Children of Tuam is in Irish cinemas now and UK cinemas from 9 October.
