er only crime was being a woman," read the tagline for The Circle, Jafar Panahi’s devastating observation of unthinkable oppression against women in a devoutly religious, rigidly patriarchal society. This tagline and brief description could just as easily apply to Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters. Both films were awarded the Golden Lion, the top prize at their respective year’s Venice Film Festival, and subsequently inspired a great deal of controversy.

What separates these two brutal exposes is their setting: Panahi’s film takes places in modern-day Iran whereas Mullan’s is set in 1960's Ireland and focuses on the Magdalene system, in which "fallen girls" were sent to harsh slave-labor laundries run by a group of ultra-nasty nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy. Like The Circle, the key theme at work in Mullan’s film is the paranoid hysteria surrounding female sexuality in a conservative religious culture. In its introductory scenes, we witness three young Irish women–Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), and Rose (Dorothy Duffy)–condemned by their shockingly unsympathetic families (or in Bernadette’s case, her Catholic orphanage) for, respectively, being raped by a drunken cousin at a wedding, getting caught flirting with some boys, and having a baby out of wedlock. Mullan makes no bones about wanting his audience to see just how absurdly unjust this system was toward women.

The Magdalene Sisters, like many prison and anti-war films, also examines the spirit-crushing result of individuals being kept away from society under strict, often inhuman conditions. Many of the women dumped off with the sisters spend decades working the laundries and end up dying there. An eccentric, elderly woman named Katy (Britta Smith) was kept in the asylum so long that she took it upon herself to act as something of a spy for the sisters, eventually programmed to view her captors with the sort of terrified admiration that military underlings often feel toward their superiors. Still, the sisters treat her really no less cruelly than any of the other women under their control. When Magdalene head Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) is informed that Katy has just died, she offhandedly, glibly remarks, "May she rest in peace," without the slightest hint of any emotion.

After its triumph in Venice, Mullan’s film was promptly denounced by the Vatican, arguably for good reason, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say The Magdalene Sisters is especially anti-Catholic any more than The Circle (banned in Iran) is anti-Islam. Instead, these films use their specific palettes to paint passionate, unabashedly feminist statements–-railing not only against the shameful sins, past and present, of Irish and Iranian society but, by implication, any system that would allow women to be treated with such appalling injustice. Since the rabidly misogynistic laws broken by the women in The Circle are still sadly very much in place in Iran, Panahi’s film might seem more inextricably rooted in the present tense, and, of course it is, but not by much. Get this: The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland finally closed its doors in 1996, surely well within the lifetime of anyone reading this. One lesson to be learned here is that while we in the United States commonly associate this sort of awful treatment with the presumably primitive Middle Eastern nations that, as of late, we have felt so compelled to "save," similar cultural conditions could very recently have been found at work in our crusading ally, the United Kingdom.

One problem that I initially had with Mullan’s film is that while the performances are uniformly fine, none of the characters really seem to open up much to reveal an essential inner life. Then I realized that this was almost certainly an intentional move on Mullan’s part, additional reinforcement of the deadening effect that a place like the Magdalene asylum can have on a person. In one scene, the sisters line the girls up naked in order to taunt their bodies, thus attempting to provoke sexual self-loathing in these supposed hussies and "hoors."In another, Bernadette uses her womanly charms to try and convince a delivery boy to take her away with him; when caught, she is left bloodied by the sisters––i.e., not so pretty anymore.

The Magdalene Sisters is, first and foremost, a fiery polemic, never allowing itself to devolve into the “triumph of the human spirit” cliches that could have probably made for an easier movie for audiences to sit through but would have terminally compromised Mullan’s intent. That said, the film’s climactic breakout is as breathlessly exciting and dramatically charged as anything I’ve seen all year. When Bernadette and Rose board the sisters up in a room together, with the former shouting "Now, stay in there you fucking bitches!" as the two make their escape, one can’t help but want to burst out cheering.