Small Things Like These
Cillian Murphy has cultivated a reputation as a strong, silent type, while resisting the inscrutability associated with that masculine cliché. His beautiful, sharp-boned face twitches and tightens and teems with feeling. It’s always busy, never blank. A story of the unspeakable gradually leaving the realm of the unsaid, “Small Things Like These” rests on both his quiet and his disquiet as an actor. As a blue-collar family man growing increasingly alert to misdeeds in the sacred heart of his community, he’s not just the conscience of Belgian director Tim Mielants’ delicate, understated film but its live emotional current.
For if Murphy’s character Bill Furlong is quiet, the town around him is practically petrified. A sleepy settlement in Ireland’s County Wexford, New Ross is, like the rest of the country, dourly in thrall to the Catholic Church, with local convent head Sister Mary (Emily Watson) held by all in tense, unquestioned esteem. The year is 1985, and a great institutional reckoning is some way off. Still, people know enough to look tactfully away from the convent’s imposing, ever-closed doors when young girls in trouble are pushed through them.
Deftly adapted by playwright Enda Walsh from Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted novella, “Small Things Like These” counts on its audience to know what’s happening behind those doors — a litany of abuses visited upon the “fallen” women and children confined in Ireland’s corrupt, Catholic-run Magdalene laundries. The drama here lies in the community blind spots, maintained through equal parts innocence and avoidance, that enabled these institutions to prosper for as long as they did.
“To get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.” So says Bill’s steely, straight-and-narrow wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), to her husband when he shows alarming signs of looking into the void. Naturally taciturn, Bill complies, though he’s always stood a little outside the circle. Born to an unwed teenage mother who escaped the laundries, instead finding sanctuary with wealthy, kindly landowner Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), he bristles at any shaming of women in equivalent circumstances. But his own guilt and grief have given him a heavy gait and a sleepless mind.
Set in the days leading up to Christmas, “Small Things Like These” makes a virtue of the midwinter’s stingy daylight. Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden (“Close”) works in hues of canvas and rust, picking out pools of half-lit clarity amid the drear, but the effect is never cozy. Tension over things unseen permeates every frame, and that’s before Bill, while delivering coal to the convent, steps uninvited past the doors, into a veritable fug of oak-paneled oppression.
Sarah (Zara Devlin), a newly admitted young mother, accosts him with a desperate plea to help her escape. She’s as frenzied as Sister Mary is immaculately calm in her interception. Assisted by Watson’s cold, uncreased performance, Mielants toys with the Gothic atmospherics of ecclesiastical horror, but doesn’t need to push them very far. Walsh’s spare, sharp dialogue is alive to the conversational traps and swerves that keep small-town consciences closed if not clean.
But it’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives “Small Things Like These” its eventual fist-in-thegut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin. Action supplants the need for questioning, or negotiation, or talk at all: At least for a moment, Murphy’s face tenses with enough defiant moral certainty to correct a church, a country and a history of sorrow.
Credits: (Ireland-belgium) An Artists Equity presentation in association with Screen Ireland of a Big Things Films production in co-production with Wilder Content. (World sales: Film Nation Entertainment, New York City.) Producers: Cillian Murphy, Alan Moloney, Matt Damon, Drew Vinton, Catherine Magee. Executive producers: Ben Affleck, Kevin Halloran, Michael Joe. Director: Tim Mielants. Screenplay: Enda Walsh, based on the novel by Claire Keegan. Camera: Frank van den Eeden. Editor: Alain Dessauvage. Music: Senjan Janson. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 15, 2024. Running time: 97 MIN. Cast: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Emily Watson, Clare Dunne, Helen Behan