The Secret Scripture

Held for more than forty years in an Irish asylum about to close, Roseanne McNulty writes her own story in the margins of a Bible. Dr Grene, the psychiatrist tasked with emptying the institution, starts trying to find out why she is there. In flashback there is the young Roseanne in Sligo during the Second World War, whose beauty becomes a matter for the town, whom the local priest fixes on, and whose relationship with an English pilot ends her life as she knew it. Jim Sheridan directed. Vanessa Redgrave plays the older Roseanne and Rooney Mara the younger. The source is Sebastian Barry's prize-winning novel. The entire argument about the film is its ending. Sheridan kept the novel's conclusion and the reviews piled onto it, one critic calling it the most misjudged ending in recent movie memory. Sheridan defended it, saying that whatever problems people have with it, it gives the woman a victory for once. When the novel came out, some critics had already written that the final twist sat badly with the rest of it. Who it is for: viewers who like drama about Ireland's institutional treatment of women, and Vanessa Redgrave. Who it is not for: anyone who needs the ending to hold. The flaw is not hidden here: the film risks everything it has built in its last ten minutes.