Dir| Frank Berry | Ireland Drama 2026
Directed by Frank Berry and starring Monica Dolan and Andrew Bennett, The Lost Children of Tuam tackles one of the darkest chapters in modern Irish history: the country’s church-run mother and baby homes, where unmarried mothers and their children were abused, exploited and often forcibly separated.
Many children were sent overseas; thousands died. Ireland’s government finally apologised to survivors in 2021, but filmmakers have been confronting this shame for decades, from The Magdalene Sisters and Philomena to Small Things Like These, and documentaries including The Missing Children, Stolen and Testimony.
This film, however, is less interested in the horrors of St Mary’s, the Bon Secours-run home in Tuam, than in the extraordinary woman who exposed them. In 2010, Catherine Corless was a wife and mother taking an adult history course when an essay led her to investigate the home’s records. What she uncovered was a decades-long scandal: children dying in shocking numbers from illness and malnutrition, then disappearing without proper burials or records.
Years of painstaking research led to her most horrifying discovery: almost 800 children, from newborns to eight-year-olds, had been buried in the grounds of the home, now largely beneath a housing-estate playground.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay (The Salt Path, She Said) wisely avoids turning Corless’s investigation into a conventional conspiracy thriller. Instead, it follows the dogged accumulation of evidence and her increasingly frustrated attempts to make the authorities listen. Monica Dolan, also superb in Mr Bates vs The Post Office, gives a beautifully understated performance. Her Catherine is no crusading heroine, but an ordinary woman who simply cannot let the evidence go. Andrew Bennett (The Quiet Girl) is equally effective as her supportive husband Aidan, while the rest of the cast maintains the film’s naturalistic tone.
[Director] takes the same restrained approach. There is no need to embellish a story this appalling: the facts do the damage. Hannah Peel’s plangent score never dictates our emotions, while Colin Campbell and Nathan Nugent’s clean, purposeful editing moves briskly through the investigation – the death certificates, Catherine’s essay, press interviews, survivors’ testimonies and, finally, the government report.
There are tantalising glimpses of Catherine’s own complicated relationship with the ‘Home Babies’. Her mother was illegitimate; as a schoolgirl, she and her classmates bullied children from St Mary’s. Brief flashbacks and the recurring sound of children’s boots marching in unison hint at a deeper psychological story that the film never quite explores. More time with Catherine and her family might also have added emotional depth.
But perhaps that restraint is deliberate. Catherine worked closely with the filmmakers and continues to campaign for Ireland’s lost children, yet this is ultimately bigger than one woman’s story. With an estimated 9,000 children dying in 18 Irish mother and baby homes between 1922 and 1958, The Lost Children of Tuam is a sober reminder that behind every statistic lies a family – and a story that was kept buried for far too long.
IN CINEMAS FROM 9 October 2026