Northern Ireland in 1960. Two Vatican priests visit a cloistered convent where they film with their 16 mm cameras a terrible asylum with tyrannical nuns, rituals of abuse and demonic possessions. It all begins when Father Thomas Riley and Father John Thornton are sent by the Holy See to this convent of the Magdalenta, which welcomes prostitutes, orphans, mentally unstable women and pregnant unmarried women, to investigate the mysterious report of a statue of the Virgin Mary that apparently bleeds.