In Small Things Like These, Cillian Murphy gives a masterclass performance in subtlety and nuance. It is a towering performance of great restraint that conveys quite powerfully what it is like to be trapped inside your own silence. Murphy’s character, Bill Furlong, is a coal merchant working in and around the Irish town of New Ross in the mid-1980s. We immediately sense that he is a fundamentally decent man, one who works hard and treats others fairly. There is nothing spectacular or particularly notable about his life. He delivers bags of coal in the frigid winter temperatures to various locations, then comes home and methodically scrubs his hands clean of the staining coal dust before sitting down with his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), and his five daughters. He appears to be a good husband, a good father.

But, sometimes decency can be its own problematic restraint, as Bill is confronted with the dawning reality that the convent to which he delivers coal is not a sanctuary, but rather one of the notorious Magdalene laundries—convents where troublesome (often pregnant) teenage girls were sent against their will to hash out their sins over hot laundry presses all day while the convents reaped the profit of their forced labor. Bill witnesses various events from afar, notably a girl being literally dragged out of a car by her mother and thrust into the arms of one of the nuns, that suggest all is not right. He later finds the girl locked outside in a shed in the freezing cold, and when he ventures inside the convent one day to deliver an invoice for the coal, he is confronted by two girls who, in the hushed voices of deep fear, beg him to help them leave. A later conversation with the convent’s stern Mother superior Sister Mary (Emily Watson) and an envelope full of cash all but confirm what is happening. Nothing is ever said outright, but we know. And so does Bill.

The question hovering over the film, and the slowly dawning source of its drama, is what will Bill do? Will he continue to be a bystander, watching and knowing but choosing not to get involved, or will he choose to intervene at some point? And, of course, how could he intervene? He is, after all, just one man and not a particularly notable one at that—one of the “small things” to which the title obliquely refers. Perhaps he will be influenced by his own childhood, which we witness in fragmented flashbacks scattered throughout the film. Born out of wedlock to a teenager mother (Agnes O’Casey), he had the good fortune to benefit from Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), the wealthy woman who employed his mother and allowed them to live on her property.

Small Things Like These was based on a novel by Claire Keegan, whose earlier novella Foster was the basis of The Quiet Girl (2022), one of the best films of that year. Both stories are set in rural Ireland in the mid-1980s, and they both share a quiet recognition of the absolute necessity of human kindness and decency, as well as a protagonist who has been damaged in life and turned inward for protection. Keegan’s stories are spare and focused on small acts that carry profound weight, even if they remain limited to a small group of characters. The film was written by Enda Walsh, who co-wrote Steven McQueen’s brutal prison drama Hunger (2008), and directed by Tim Mielants, whose most recent film, Wil (2023), is about conflicted policemen in the German-occupied city of Antwerp during World War II. Mielants keeps the film’s style relatively simple and direct, leaning into repeating visual motifs including a fixed camera on the back of Bill’s truck and the close-ups of him washing his hands, to reinforce the mundanity of his life. But, most importantly, Mielants recognizes how the story hinges entirely on Cillian Murphy’s performance and his commitment to playing a man for whom much is raging internally even if we don’t see it manifested in particularly dramatic ways. Small Things Like These is much like Bill, with so very, very much happening just below the surface.

Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

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