As a boy forced by his nun-teacher to root around in a full garbage can in order to retrieve and then eat the half-finished sandwich I'd tossed in there, the occasional and peculiar sadism practiced by some members of the Catholic orders back in the sixties is not wholly unfamiliar. But nothing prepares you for the wholesale attempt to destroy the human spirit exhibited by the members of the Magdalene sisterhood circa 1964 Dublin, as portrayed in actor-turned-director Peter Mullan's flawed but powerful drama The Magdalene Sisters, recipient of the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival.

The Magdalene sisters, headed by the near-psychotic Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) run a home for "wayward" girls, girls whose "sinful" behaviour runs the gamut from mere flirting with boys to those who've given birth out of wedlock. Ostensibly, the sisters are to bring the girls back to the Lord and straighten them out, but in practice the bullying sisters seem more intent on giving vent to their own sadistic and/or sexual fantasies.

Into this hell come our three main protagonists. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is forced to go there after being raped by a cousin at a wedding while Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), is an orphan whose flirtatious behaviour has landed her with the sisters. Rose (Dorothy Duffy), who has already suffered the ignominy of having given birth out of wedlock, finds herself confined as well. Who will escape and survive and who won't?

When it premiered in Venice, the film was, not surprisingly, hugely controversial; many Catholics thought it too extreme and harsh a depiction (and perhaps that's why the jury gave it the grand prize). It IS too extreme-but not from the point of view of truthfulness. It is too extreme from the point of view of good drama. After four or five scenes in which the nuns come off as one degree away from concentration camp guards, a viewer longs for the film's black-and-white moral code to make room for a little grey. But almost no attempt is made to give the nuns even a smidgen of humanity. By the time the obligatory lesbian-nun scene and the subsequent abusive-priest scene come along one can't help but see an irony. Mullan's fire-and-brimstone approach toward the nuns mirrors that of the nuns toward their charges: both deprive their subjects of their humanity. A powerful film is shortchanged as a result.