Mildew and misery in 1940s Ireland
(Independent.ie Film & Cinema)

God Ireland must be an awful place to live: all that rain and mildew and public drunkenness and street fighting, not to mention the sadistic, predatory clerics. This relentlessly gloomy and, one would have to admit, partly accurate vision of our country has been peddled internationally in countless films, but rarely more depressingly than in The Secret Scripture. Jim Sheridan`s adaptation of Sebastian Barry`s novel is set in Sligo and stars Vanessa Redgrave as Rose McNulty, an elderly inmate at a run-down mental hospital that`s about to be demolished.