The Devil's Doorway (2018) on Netflix
October 1960. Two priests, Father Thomas Riley and Father John Thornton, are sent to an Irish home for fallen women. A statue of the Virgin Mary bled from the eyes.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.3/104,919 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes68%
Trailer
Plot summary
An unsigned letter reaches the Vatican in 1960: in the chapel of a Magdalene home in Ireland, a statue of the Virgin Mary has wept blood from its eyes. Father Thomas Riley and Father John Thornton are the two priests assigned to look into the claim. Thomas has met too many fakes and treats the business as a con; John, the younger man, arrives hoping it is real. The Mother Superior tells them the girls in her charge are not all good, shows them they are unwelcome, and houses them in separate rooms. The blood has dried, so nothing can be analyzed, and John sets a 16 mm camera on the statue to wait. He interviews the women and finds they are kept out of the chapel and put to work in the laundry.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Devil's Doorway (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Aislinn Clarke said she wanted to publicise the horrors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries: she had her son at 17, the year after the last laundry closed in 1996, and said she could have been sent to one had her circumstances been different.
- Clarke said Lalor Roddy, who plays Father Thomas, was the only lead actor who did not come through her usual process: the script fell into his hands, he asked to read for it, auditioned in her office and won the part, even though she had been looking to cast someone younger.
- Aislinn Clarke said the film had about 16 days to shoot, on a tiny budget with very little lead-in or development time, and that she led a team of dozens through long hours with little to no sleep.
- Cinematographer Ryan Kernaghan shot The Devil's Doorway mostly on 16mm film, mimicking the home movies of the period with flickering ellipses and flares of dazzling, burned-out white.
