Small Things Like These ★★★½

Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a good man. He owns a coal company and works long hours to provide for his wife and five daughters. He may be tired, but at the dinner table, he is fully engaged, serving his daughters their dinner, making sure they have enough to eat, and admiring some of the work they have done. In the office, his eldest daughter Kathleen (Liadán Dunlea) works with him and even when she insists she is not cold, he makes sure the space heater is nearby just in case. He is quiet and unassuming, keen to go about his work but with an observational eye and, as his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) notes, a “soft heart.” Thus, when he encounters a woman bringing a young woman into a convent against her will, he cannot look away. When he goes into the convent after a coal delivery and is confronted by a young woman begging him to help her escape, he is shocked but cannot forget.

Small Things Like These, directed by Tim Mielants and adapted by Enda Walsh from the novel by Claire Keegan, is a heavy film. Set at Christmas in 1985, it follows as Bill Furlong tries to live his life, only to find himself unable to after being confronted by the reality of the “Magdalene laundries” in his Irish hometown. These facilities sought to control and punish women deemed to be “fallen.” Though set in 1985 Ireland, it is hard not to think of parallels around the modern world. During a delivery, he will find a young woman named Sarah (Zara Devlin) locked in a shed (presumably being punished by the nuns), pregnant, and with marks all over her body. In her and in every woman he sees at the convent, Bill sees his own family, especially his daughters and, in flashbacks, his unmarried mother Sarah Furlong (Agnes O’Casey). As he tells Eileen, in a scene that feels like the film’s heart and soul, he knows that these women “could be” his daughters. He further confesses that, when a woman begged him to help her, he told her that what happens to her is, “not up to me.” Though she assures him that response was correct, urges him to forget what he saw, and to rest in the comfort of knowing that his daughters would never be at a convent like this, this does little to soothe his aching and guilty soul. He knows he could help and he knows too much to forget.

Small Things Like These is a film about what a good person can do in the face of tyranny, corruption, and oppression. The town around him is silently complicit. If one knows, they say nothing for fear of retribution from the Church. Sister Mary (Emily Watson) runs it with an iron fist and when she discovers that Bill knows, pulls out every card she has to play. A fellow nun threatens to use Bill’s coal rival, then Mary threatens his youngest daughters’ education and tries to bribe him with gifts. All over town, he is told to drop it and to forget what he saw. These young women, for every one in New Ross, Ireland, and across the country, are out of sight and out of mind. Remembering the exploitation and suffering in those walls would be to threaten one’s own livelihood and peace in the name of helping a stranger and fighting a system that is ingrained in the fabric of the town’s culture. It is not just a corrupt business. It is the Catholic Church. Sister Mary and other local religious figures have their fingers in everything, while their faces are everywhere at the moment with Christmas tree lightings and preparations underway for Christmas mass. This is just a small town. This is just one convent. What good could be done by fighting this one case of injustice?

Small Things Like These is a small and quiet picture. It is not one of grand events or one that covers the toppling of this horrific period of Irish and human history. It is a story of a “small thing,” an act of heroism and a kindness to help just one woman out of her plight to give her a chance at a future outside of the convent walls and away from the nuns. It is about how it may not be one’s daughters, wife, sister or any woman they know in peril, but it could be and that someone in peril is someone else’s daughter, wife, friend, sister, or more. One does not need to chip away at the overall system, they just need to make one small dent and assist one person for it to be a worthwhile sacrifice.

Cillian Murphy’s incredible performance anchors it all. He wears every inch of pain in Bill’s mind. Quiet and understated, one can see him consumed by the guilt he feels for ignoring what is happening, subconsciously trying to make it up by being even kinder to his daughters but being worn down by the burden of knowledge. Murphy’s body language is remarkable in this, communicating the building suffocating mood of the picture as his tense and quiet demeanor becomes something more, a metaphorical weight on his shoulders and a constriction of his throat that he cannot shake or break through. The work of DP Frank van den Eeden is especially effective in close-ups on Murphy’s face, allowing the shellshock and trauma in his eyes to come to the forefront, while Murphy’s every small expression is amplified. It is a subtle and richly textured performance, disappearing into the nuance and conflict at Bill’s core. The flashbacks are often crucial to this, showing memories he has of Christmas with his mother, his own ungratefulness for what she does for him, and his inability to make amends. Emily Watson’s Sister Mary is also impressive, making the most of her limited screen time to cast a long shadow over the film, mirroring the convent’s control of the town. She has a sinister and flat manner of speech, an ability to cut through to one’s heart with her words and strike fear therein. Watson cuts to the core of a woman who is assumed to be kind and wise, but has a casual deviousness about her that truly chills.

Small Things Like These does not give a lot of detail on the Magdalene laundries, instead opting to focus on the story of one convent and one man who sought to help one woman. Bill does not know the full extent of the crisis, just that a woman needs his help and he is in a position to offer that help, if only he is willing to take a personal risk. Slow and precise in its development, Small Things Like These has a righteous fury building throughout, as well as a suffocating, bleak, and haunting mood that fills every frame. Christmas feels less joyous when juxtaposed with man-made horrors. A town willing to come together to celebrate and worship, but not to rescue those in need paints a startling image of a society complicit in oppression and a tyrannical organization that has infiltrated everything to the point that it feels insurmountable and overwhelming. This is a profoundly moving film with an emotional punch that does not readily leave one’s memory.