The Secret Scripture

The most strik­ing moment in Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scrip­ture occurs in the very first scene, as a soft Irish voice repeat­ed­ly states, ​“My name is Rose McNul­ty. I did not kill my child.”

Old­er and younger incar­na­tions of Rose are played by Vanes­sa Red­grave and Rooney Mara respec­tive­ly. The for­mer dic­tates an account of her mis­for­tunes to psy­chol­o­gist, Dr Grene (Eric Bana), as doc­u­ment­ed in the graf­fi­tied bible she’s kept hid­den dur­ing her plus 40-year stay in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. She’s been there since the wan­ing days of World War Two, admit­ted under accu­sa­tions of both infan­ti­cide and nympho­ma­nia. Con­vinced the son she had snatched away from her is still alive, the old­er Rose argues her case.

The film offers an exam­i­na­tion of how the church and state’s con­trol of sex­u­al­i­ty have taint­ed and destroyed the lives of many women. It is not con­cerned with the wider polit­i­cal issues of the peri­od, but a lit­tle more speci­fici­ty would cer­tain­ly help the film, as both its lack of nuance and per­sis­tent plot­ting issues fre­quent­ly under­mine much of the poten­tial emo­tion­al heft.

Mara tries her best to con­vey hid­den depths in every facial expres­sion, but her Rose even­tu­al­ly becomes an unknow­able cipher as the sto­ry around her frays out into too many unman­age­able and awk­ward directions.

Script con­fu­sion is rife. There’s one sub­plot where a character’s life is threat­ened by a band of angry vil­lagers, but their exact moti­va­tion to kill him is nev­er artic­u­lat­ed. Giv­en the trau­ma­tised sto­ry­teller, this nar­ra­tive unre­li­a­bil­i­ty may be delib­er­ate, but the film doesn’t lead to some big twist con­cern­ing the strength of her memory.

That said, the finale does have a twist of anoth­er kind – a big reveal so asi­nine, and played with such gloopy sen­ti­ment (and over­laid with an out-of-place Kel­ly Clark­son song), that it makes oft-mocked day­time soap operas seem sub­tle by comparison.