Fresh off last year's award-winning success in the worldwide phenomenon that was Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy is back in the more modest Irish production, Small Things Like These. This pensive character-driven work offers a perfect vehicle for his massive talents. His fervent performance anchors the film, giving it the necessary heart and soul to elevate the film above a minor work driven by a moral message.
Instead, Small Things Like These becomes an urgent call. Confronting one chapter in the history of the Catholic Church's abuses in Ireland, the film focuses on their use of the Magdalene Laundries (also known as Magdalene asylums), which operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries, where unwed mothers were traditionally sent for punishment and supposed rehabilitation.
Belgian director Tim Mielants successfully uses his lead to reach beyond inherent historical specifics. Confronting the Catholic Church's ugly and overly long misrule in Ireland through a concentrated portrait of individual courage, he gives this vision wider relevance. The film is a powerful reminder that evil thrives when complicity reigns.
Based on the Booker Prize-nominated novella of the same name by Claire Keegan, legendary screenwriter Enda Walsh takes his cue from the original source material to maintain a spare script. Small Things Like These has a rather limited focus and a simple plot that doesn't offer a comprehensive perspective but does allow both the filmmaker and actor room to develop a profound emotional resonance around the subject matter. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though it gnaws a bit when the viewer experiences a rather naïve ending.
The film's focus remains squarely on Murphy's Bill Furlong, a devoted family man and hard-working coal merchant who lives a contented routine existence in a small, God-fearing Irish town. Mielants (who worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders) wisely uses the actor as the fulcrum upon which to hinge the action, such as there is.
Leading up to Christmas 1985, day after day, Bill visits his regular clients. Like clockwork, he then comes home to wash up and spend time with his family. His actions are repetitive, rendered practically shot for shot, but not once is there a suggestion of tedium — it's just his accepted way of life.
Mielants fixes the camera on Murphy's face from the outset, capturing every tick and expression as Bill observes even the most minute details around him. This is where Murphy's gift lies. A mostly silent type, he draws the viewer in with every tiny gesture as his character watches people and landscapes with great interest. It's absorbing to watch Bill take in every element as if to impart it with enormous significance.
Soon though, events start to disrupt these everyday rhythms. His sense of internal calm is shattered as he watches a mother mercilessly shove her distraught daughter through the forbidding doors of the church's local Magdalene Laundry in the town's countryside. His face registers concern, but there is also an unnerving sense of acquiescence.
Though a brief moment, it's a frightening scene that leaves him shaken and conjures memories from his own past. This is the start of the true narrative trajectory of the film as past and present merge. He remembers his own single mother, who along with himself, was taken in by her kindly employer to work in the wealthy woman's house.
Up to this point, the camera has been static, either focusing on Bill's repetitious movements or pondering his ever more thoughtful face. As he recalls past events, the camera engages in a frantic searching movement, scouring the labyrinthine corridors of his memories and ever so slowly revealing secrets that he obviously wanted to keep dormant forever, but which, of course, could not remain hidden.
The film mirrors this movement through the past with the camera's movement through the halls of the convent as Bill finds himself repeatedly lost there. It's a completely engaging strategy. By accident one day, Bill finds himself wandering down the convent halls and comes face to face with a frightened teen begging for him to help her escape. But it's obvious that he feels his own form of terror of going against the church. The weight of the pressure on him is evident.
There's another key scene that brings the drama (along with the director's strategic use of close-ups) to a head after he finds a girl locked in a shed outdoors in the cold. The Mother Superior (Emily Watson) immediately insists he have tea and the three of them sit by the fire. As innocuous as this sounds, the scene brings a sense of panic to the fore as the director shoots them in rapid-fire succession in close-up. No threats are technically uttered, but the tension is so thick, and the drama is so wrought, it's downright Gothic in its horror.
None of this would work if it weren't for Mielants's economy of style, which prevents it all, especially the performances, from becoming melodramatic. Much of Bill's deep inner turmoil is only suggested, making it all the more disturbing. As Bill aimlessly wanders the hall of the convent, we don't see much but we hear the sounds: cries and screams of unknown origins. Yet somehow, the source of the unknown horror is obvious. So, too, does the drab lighting of the film's cinematography suggest the hold that this institution has over the entire town. Even in the light of day, the images are pale and dreary as if in a bad dream.
Small Things Like These is more a slice of life than a plot-driven narrative. It doesn't give the young women much agency, but that's down to the source material and the reality of that situation historically. The strength of the film is how it communicates the tacit nature of everyone touched by the church and their zombie-like acceptance of its unchecked power.
The restraint exercised by Mielants and Murphy is what gives Small Things Like These its intensity and power. By avoiding the larger trappings of melodrama, the film is able to speak to unspeakable evil and be an inspiration for individual courage. There's a quiet but gripping trepidation that lurks beneath the surface of this story, and while this isn't directly dealt with, the film is no less horrifying in its indictment of our complicity in the evils perpetrated all around us.