IT’S NO FUN being a child on screen this week. A clutch of movies suggest that it’s probably best to stay in the womb.

School for the teenagers in Song for a Raggy Boy is definitely not the best years of their lives. The film stars Aidan Quinn as William Franklin, a Spanish Civil War veteran and lay teacher at an Irish reform school in 1939, who leaps to the defence of the 13-year-olds subjected to physical and sexual cruelty by the Catholic brothers.

Like Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, set in a convent-run laundry, Aisling Walsh’s film depicts an enclosed world of sadism, abuse and a corrosive culture of secrecy. But where Mullan’s film viewed events from the involving perspective of the victims, Walsh is more concerned with the black-and-white clash between the too-saintly Franklin and the brutally strict disciplinarian Brother John (Iain Glen).

There are decent performances all round (even when Glen is frothing at the mouth during one beating). But the film suffers from intrusive, sepia-tinted flashbacks to Spain, an underline-every-emotion score and a wayward tone that veers between measured observation and Dead Poets Society sentimentality.

You can’t help but be moved when the film wields the strap. Elsewhere, though, it is never quite as involving as it should be.

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