{"id":793600,"date":"2026-10-06T10:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/793600\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T10:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:06:09","slug":"the-lost-children-of-tuam-review-deeply-serious-retelling-of-irelands-devastating-tragedy-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/793600\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Children of Tuam review \u2013 deeply serious retelling of Ireland\u2019s devastating tragedy | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

The children were never lost; if a baby goes missing, the police get called, social services become involved. The babies born at the mother and baby home run by nuns in the town of Tuam in County Galway were discarded: up to 796 tiny bodies thrown away, some in an old sewage tank. The amateur historian who uncovered the horror<\/a> of the mass graves at the St Mary\u2019s mother and baby home is Catherine Corless, superbly played here by Monica Dolan. Produced by Liam Neeson, and based on a 2017 New York Times article<\/a>, The Lost Children of Tuam is a painful, devastating film. It feels scraped clean of anything unnecessary that might trivialise, fiction-ise or movie-ise what happened at St Mary\u2019s, home to thousands of unmarried women and children between 1925 and 1961.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gets me out of the house,\u201d Corless says when she starts a course in local history. She turns detective after becoming interested in the children from St Mary\u2019s, and what she uncovers is that babies died at a rate of nearly one a fortnight at the home \u2013 from whooping cough, measles, malnutrition and other childhood illnesses. Eventually, she obtains nearly 800 death certificates, but cannot find burial records for the babies. There are no graves.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It is usual to say that a film like The Lost Children<\/a> of Tuam is a difficult watch \u2013 but in fact it\u2019s the opposite: hard to look away. Dolan is excellent as Corless, who does most of her research at her kitchen table, and is ill at ease in the spotlight when the media finally picks up the story. Just as compelling are the actors playing the survivors \u2013 neglected and abused by nuns as children, now in their late middle age. Some only appear for a matter of moments, but their faces stayed with me. It\u2019s a deeply serious film; there\u2019s no exhilaration at the end, no comforting sense of closure, just pain.<\/p>\n

The Lost Children of Tuam is in Irish cinemas now and UK cinemas from 9 October<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The children were never lost; if a baby goes missing, the police get called, social services become involved.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-793600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}