FILM OF THE WEEK: The Lost Children of Tuam - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

There is a moment in The Lost Children Of Tuam when Catherine Corless receives a phone call from an official who has news about the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. Human remains have been discovered in the substructure of what had once been a sewage system – the remains of babies.

The phone call is short, the language careful and informative, the woman on the phone remains unseen. But as Catherine asks how many babies do they think they have found, the woman’s voice wobbles as she replies “A substantial amount, Catherine.”

The women end the call politely, but their wavering breath and catching voices convey two bodies struggling to contain the truth that has just been shared. Nobody gives a speech. Nobody explains to us the obscenity of what has been discovered. They don’t need to.

Frank Berry’s extraordinary film understands the power of what remains unspoken due to secrecy, and what cannot be captured in words. It also understands that, in telling a story about one of the most shameful chapters of Irish history, it would not only be unnecessary to engage in cinematic grandstanding, it would feel almost indecent. The horror is already there; Berry does not need to manufacture it.

Written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and starring a superb Monica Dolan as Corless (though I admit, I wonder why an Irish actress didn’t play the role), The Lost Children Of Tuam traces the local historian’s investigation into the children who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.

What begins as historical research slowly reveals itself to contain almost unthinkable darkness, as one woman’s modest project transforms into a reckoning around the Church, the treatment of women and children in Mother and Baby Homes, and an attempt to receive justice for the hundreds and hundreds of children's lives, deaths, and bodies that had been treated as though they did not matter.

Berry has always been a filmmaker of deep social conscience, working with communities to tell honest and empathetic stories that reveal difficult truths about a country we often tout as being progressive and a protector of the underdog. In Michael Inside, Berry’s film about about Ireland’s prison system, and Aisha, his feature about Direct Provision, institutional violence emerges not through sensationalism but through its intrusion into ordinary life, and that instinct becomes incredibly powerful here.

Much of The Lost Children Of Tuam unfolds in kitchens, offices, archives, graveyards and over telephone calls, as Catherine begins to realise the sheer amount of children who died at the Bon Secours home, and that there are no records of their burials.

The sheer ordinariness of the backdrop is profoundly effective, showing not only that one woman could have such an impact on Ireland, but of the way bureaucracy, red tape, and people never asking questions can conceal such horrors.

Catherine’s journey is a series of small actions. She makes lists, crosses off names, looks through records, requests files, asks questions. It’s as if the ordinary nature of the world and the actions she is taking should yield some reasonable explanation – but they never do. Each individual action is small, but their cumulative meaning is monstrous.

Dolan is remarkable at conveying that accumulation. Her Catherine does not begin as a crusader or someone conscious that she is about to change Ireland. She is curious, persistent, morally clear, and increasingly unable to look away. And as the scale of what she is discovering becomes apparent, Dolan seems almost physically altered by the knowledge. The word that came to mind again and again as I watched her was “haunted.”

The restraint of her performance is crucial. Characters in The Lost Children Of Tuam rarely articulate the enormity of what they are experiencing. Emotion instead gathers in faces, pauses and voices. And the emotional impact of this choice is immense. By refusing to release all of that emotion onscreen, the film leaves the audience somewhere to put its own grief and anger – and there is plenty of both.

One title card tells us that 9,000 children died in 18 Mother and Baby Homes between 1922 and 1998. The number is staggering.

The film reveals the terrifying consequences of allowing institutions to claim moral authority while denying the humanity of those under their control. Shame, sin, silence, and ideas of legitimacy and respectability were imposed upon unmarried mothers and their children by institutions committing acts of unspeakable cruelty themselves.

One of the simplest lines in the film reveals this hypocrisy. Confronted with what she has uncovered, Catherine tells her husband Aidan, “What they did was evil – the real thing.

Through remarkable restraint, Berry has made a film that is not only about the dangers of silence and the importance of breaking it, but also about what is possible when individuals decide to pursue the truth and follow their conscience. The Lost Children Of Tuam is a profoundly moving, beautifully controlled film about what happens when one woman decides that the missing must be accounted for.

It is of course about cruelty and complicity, but it is also about persistence, testimony and the radical moral force of paying attention.

I have thought of this film every day since I’ve seen it. Which means I’ve thought of those children. And isn’t that the entire point.

Directed by Frank Berry. Written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Dan Barry. Edited by Colin Campell and Nathan Nugent. Cinematography by Kate McCullough. Music by Hannah Peel. 84 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: