The basic fact of the matter is, if you really want to nudge up the quality or impact of a film you’re making – any film – then you could do a lot worse than hire actor Monica Dolan as your lead. Although the films she tends to star in often aren’t massively high profile, she is – like the protagonist she plays in Frank Berry’s true-life drama The Lost Children of Tuam – assembling a case study whose thesis suggests she’s currently one of the finest and most thoughtful actors working today.
As Galway-based amateur historian Catherine Corless she tamps down the melodrama and ups the raw emotion while working on an investigative essay about possible mass child graves discovered at the long-since-shuttered Bön Secours Mother and Baby Home in her village of Tuam. In some ways this is a film about ways to find new outlets for your passions in later life, and her journey to uncover the truth is never framed as an obsession, more just a valuable reason to get up in the morning. The film is a simply made procedural that carefully hits all of its expected beats, with Corless eventually locking horns with the nuns whose alleged malpractice her research implicates. Its style and subject matter do make it feel like a better fit for the small screen, yet this is a surprisingly effective celebration of how determination and diligence are the perfect tools to win any argument, especially when you know you’re right.