Ireland’s now infamous ‘mother and baby homes’ have been the subject of several films. Aisling Walsh’s Sinners (2002), Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and Stephen Frear’s Philomena (2013), as well as numerous documentaries, have focused on the abuses suffered by the women detained in these homes and the fates of their children, many of them sold to wealthy families. According to the Irish government’s 2021 Commission of Investigation into the homes, between 1922 and 1995, approximately 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children were detained, at least 9n000 of the children not surviving their time in the institutions. As Claire Keegan writes in the Afterword to her 2021 novella, upon which this film is based, ‘Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they would have had.’