The films Monica Dolan tends to appear in “aren’t massively high profile”, said David Jenkins on Little White Lies, though she is “one of the finest and most thoughtful actors working today”. In this true-life drama, she plays Galway-based amateur historian Catherine Corless, who in 2010 chose the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, in her home town of Tuam, as the subject of an assignment for her evening class in local history.
In the course of her research, Corless discovered that, over four decades, 800 babies and infants had died at the home. Their deaths had been concealed, and their remains buried on site. Some were dumped in a disused septic tank. Dolan “tamps down the melodrama and ups the raw emotion” in a film that “carefully hits all of its expected beats”.
The scandal was the subject of a 2017 New York Times article, said Kevin Maher in The Times, which is adapted here by screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Sensitively directed by Frank Berry, the film “advances clearly and respectfully” through the investigation, as Corless insists on answers from the religious order that ran the home, and the Catholic establishment, and so uncovers evidence of systemic abuse and appalling cruelty. Yet she is herself an “unexpectedly complex” figure, who is recovering from depression – and also haunted by the cruelty that she meted out to the Bon Secours children she met in her youth.
It is “a painful, devastating film”, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian. Dolan really excels here, as do the actors who play the survivors. Some appear only briefly, “but their faces stayed with me”. You’d expect a drama like this to be “a difficult watch”, but with such assured performances, it is the opposite: you can’t look away.