Jim Sheridan’s handsome yet flimsy melodrama The Secret Scripture (★★, cert 12A, 109 mins) turns out to be a tale of two actresses, one great, one getting there, neither quite given the script they deserve.
We’re greeted by no less a figure than Vanessa Redgrave, lasting out her days in a decommissioned asylum in Sligo in the early 1990s, thereby delaying plans to convert her long-term residence into a trendy health spa. Rewinding to World War II, we meet Rooney Mara, fearless, free-spirited, described at that time as “a tempting beauty”, and thus perhaps inevitably doomed to be wronged by the men of her era.
