Cillian Murphy follows up his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer performance with another tour-de-force in Small Things Like These, a drama about Ireland’s horrific Magdalene laundries, whose placid surface conceals roiling anguish and fury.
Murphy’s eyes are once again the key to his titanic turn, conveying the tumultuous thoughts racing through his protagonist’s mind and the immense burden weighing upon his soul. With a far-off gaze and a frequently downturned face, the acclaimed star delivers a masterclass in silent expressiveness, and he proves the riveting axis around which Tim Mielants’ precise and deft feature revolves.
Adapted from Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, Small Things Like These, in theaters Nov. 8, identifies neither the specific location nor time period of its tale, although it’s clearly a rural Irish town (New Ross, it turns out) and—as implied by a variety of small details, such as the cartoons playing on a family’s color television—it’s Christmastime during the mid-1980s.
In this working-class enclave, Bill Furlong (Murphy) is the coal merchant upon whom everyone relies, and he spends his days overseeing coworkers and transporting his goods (in enormous bags) via his rusty truck. In the first shots of Bill, his face is obscured or hidden, and he’s spied through a window—an early hint about his closed-off demeanor. Nonetheless, if remote, he’s also kind, deferentially smiling as he waits for food at a pub, and stopping on an empty road to give spare change to a kid whose father, it’s later disclosed, is a drunk and less-than-attentive caregiver.
Bill is married to Eileen (Eileen Walsh), with whom he has five lively and loving daughters, and when they ask him if he ever wanted anything for the holiday, he confesses that he once coveted a jigsaw puzzle. Arriving on the heels of an earlier sequence in which a boy asks for that identical gift, Small Things Like These reveals that this previously spied kid is young Bill (Louis Kirwan)—one of many instances in which Mielants makes connections between then and now with graceful subtlety.
In the past, adolescent Bill lives with his mother Sarah (Agnes O’Casey) and an older woman named Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley) who appears to be caring for them with the aid of her farmhand Ned (Mark McKenna). Such childhood memories initially appear to be spurred by Bill’s aforementioned run-in with the kid. However, they truly begin plaguing him following a delivery to the local convent, during which he spies a mother forcing her vehemently objecting daughter inside.
Watching this scene play out from the dark of the convent’s coal shed, Bill looks downright haunted, and it’s not long before he’s retreating into himself. While his kids don’t notice this, Eileen does, yet Bill remains mum about the cause of his mounting malaise. Murphy so powerfully suggests his protagonist’s grief, anger, and confusion that one can practically feel it in their own chest, and the director amplifies a sense of Bill’s detachment by constantly framing him (and others) in doorways and mirrors.
Lost in himself, Bill strives to maintain a grip on the good things he has, be it his business or his clan, and the actor communicates this effort—and the toll it takes on him—with minimal flair and monumental intensity, epitomized by short, harsh breaths that soon become a defining feature of his day-to-day.
Small Things Like These doesn’t immediately explicate the source of Bill’s crisis, but it’s exacerbated by a trip inside the convent to serve an invoice that puts him face-to-face with a female resident who tearfully begs him to spirit her to safety. This encounter rocks Bill, and he’s thrown for an even bigger loop when, early one morning, he discovers a girl hiding in the convent’s shed. Bill returns her to the establishment and its Mother Superior, Sister Mary (Emily Watson). What ensues is a lengthy sit-down between Bill and the convent bigwig, during which both engage in an unspoken, tense performance, with Mary pretending that she’s concerned about the girl and Bill feigning ignorance about the fact that things aren’t nearly as cheery as she wants them to seem.
That this girl’s name is Sarah—the same as Bill’s mother—only further stirs in him a desire to do something, anything, to help her, and yet even his minor attempt to provide assistance quickly becomes town gossip. Warned that interfering with the convent will jeopardize his reputation, his livelihood, and his daughters’ academic prospects, Bill is presented with a simple, if immensely difficult, ethical choice.
Small Things Like These establishes and raises the stakes of its situation at the same time that its fragmentary flashbacks indicate the foundational trauma motivating Bill to risk his stable, happy life for a complete stranger. With a delicacy that’s as impressive as the circular pans that he uses to establish his milieu and Bill’s place within it, Mielants creates harmonious echoes between his yesterday and today, illustrating the deeply rooted emotions and impulses driving his main character toward an inevitable personal reckoning—or destructive explosion.
In a coda, Mielants and writer Enda Walsh dedicate their work to the tens of thousands of “fallen women” who for decades were sent to such Magdalene laundries to secretly give birth, hand over their children, and be conscripted into what amounted to slave labor. The film resounds with outrage at this horrific practice carried out by the Catholic Church. Its indignation, however, is matched by its optimism, here embodied by Murphy’s Bill, an ordinary father and husband compelled by circumstance and history to confront an evil that’s all the more imposing for being ingrained in the fabric of his community and country.
Small Things Like These posits Bill as a most unlikely Yuletide angel, and one whose mercy is far from guaranteed, given the high price it will cost him. As with its source material, the film is sparse and economical, but that’s not the same thing as slender. Paying meticulous attention to the shifts in Bill’s thinking, as well as the roots of his dilemma, it’s a concise morality play about the literal danger of doing the right thing, and the even greater peril of doing nothing at all.
