Small Things Like These Review: Small Town, Big Secrets

Small Things Like These is modest in runtime and ambition, but it allows Cillian Murphy’s sublime performance to convey its message and anger.

He lifted his head up when everyone else was keeping theirs down, and what he saw changed his life forever. It’s an epic hook on a local scale. It’s a more painful story than The Quiet Girl, which was also adapted from a Keegan novel, but one that seeks to stir its audience in similar ways with its humility and grace.

The story of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries is a particularly scandalous one. Run by religious orders, the laundries were somewhere young women who fell pregnant out of wedlock could be sent by their families to hide their shame. There they would have their children, often forcibly give them up for adoption, and offer penance in the form of hard labor for their sins. The story is well-known and documented; on film, the best example would be 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan’s angry and raw story of three women who went through such a laundry. Small Things Like These takes a different approach, examining how people living in the shadow of such an institution could allow its horrors to be perpetrated. The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland only closed in 1996, so it’s a wound that is still relatively fresh, and the film approaches it with a firm but gentle probe.

We meet Bill using his spare hours to make extra deliveries of coal and fuel to fund the upcoming Christmas festivities. It’s 1985, and Ireland is in economic doldrums, and Mielants and screenwriter Enda Walsh make a point of emphasizing how dire the country’s financial straits truly were. With the people unable to dream any size of a dream, the moral authority of the Catholic Church was permitted to hold sway. The town and surrounding countryside in which Bill makes his living is populated by bowed heads and quiet voices. The palette is predominantly gray, from the snowy sky to the moss-dappled concrete buildings. This means that when color and revelations come to the fore, they stand out among the darkness for all to see.

While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill sees a visibly upset young woman being bundled inside by her parents. Bill knows what happens there, and so does everyone else. However, this one instance stirs something in Bill, and his basic humanity leaves him incapable of inaction. Small Things Like These emphasizes the broken complacency of the locals, living in fear of the Church’s ideals. As represented by Emily Watson’s Sister Mary, the threats of the Church are always veiled, and authority speaks in suggestions and nods.

Up against all this is Murphy, who is quietly astounding. Though less verbose and energetic than his portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, those baby blue eyes contain a world of pain, as he reconciles his own pain to that of the women the nuns have under their thumb. As Bill watches his wife and daughters prepare for Christmas and beyond, Murphy’s face subtly but brilliantly betrays an ocean of boiling despondency.

Mielants brings an outsider’s perspective to Small Things Like These. He refuses to sit on clichés of Irish miserabilism, eschewing handheld camera at every opportunity for composed shots and longer takes. A shot of Murphy looking out his window, while the orange glow of a streetlight paints him in silhouette, ably communicates his growing enlightenment and need to act. Moments like this often lead to flashbacks, as Bill recalls his own experiences at the hands of religious orders.

The leaps between Bill’s past and present are inelegant in the script and edit; Mielants and Walsh could have afforded a little more breathing room for these scenes, but they trust that Keegan’s literary efficiency will translate to the screen. For the most part, it does. Small Things Like These might be too brief for its own good, but it reflects its own protagonist’s feelings about his place in the world. Much like the film he’s in, Bill Furlong can only do so much, but that doesn’t mean his actions don’t have power.

Small Things Like These will be released in UK & Irish cinemas on November 1, 2024 and in US theaters on November 8.