“If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore”. This stern advice is directed at Cillian Murphy’s morally tortured anti-hero in Small Things Like These by his wife. At face value, a fairly standard exchange between a hard-headed woman and a soft-hearted man. But the wounds that come from ignoring terrible secrets happening right on your doorstep is also the overriding theme of this brooding Irish psychodrama, which takes place in a small country town over a glum, snowy Christmas some time in the 1980s. Handsomely packaged by Belgian director Tim Meilants, this sombre literary adaptation world premieres at the Berlinale this week, a solid marriage of serious themes and star power to open the festival’s main Competition section.
Finely acted and beautifully shot, Small Things Like These is a classy star vehicle and heartfelt personal project for Murphy, who also co-produces, reuniting him with his sometime Peaky Blinders collaborator Mielants. Whether an audience exists for another relentlessly grim, self-flagellating Irish confessional about downtrodden souls crushed by an institutionally corrupt Catholic church is a moot point, but Murphy’s booming profile after Oppenheimer (2023) will undoubtedly help fill seats. Enlisting a Belgian director to shoot such an emphatically Irish story also feels like a smart choice, bringing fresh eyes to familiar cinematic themes and landscapes.
The talent list behind Small Things Like These is certainly stellar. The source novel is an international best-seller by Claire Keegan, whose writing previously inspired the Oscar-nominated The Quiet Girl (2022). Screenwriter Enda Walsh is an award-winning playwright with a long track record of working with Murphy, plus a rich catalogue of stage and screen credits including the international hit musicals Once and Lazarus. Meanwhile, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are on board as producers through their Artists Equity company.
Small Things Like These take place in New Ross, a small town in Country Wexford in the southeast corner of Ireland. The historical period is never specified, but Keegan’s book was set in 1985, an era the film-makers subtly evoke with glancing references to period pop music, sports stars, TV shows and more. Murphy plays William Furlong, a reserved family man with a humble home and a solid small business delivering coal, wood and peat across the town. William is also doting father to five daughters, and a loving but slightly detached husband to Eileen (Eileen Walsh).
William appears to be carrying a heavy internal burden, working through buried trauma. He is shy, timid man at heart, but also generous and empathetic. When he stumbles across a terrified young inmate at his local Magdalene laundry, one of those notorious church-run asylums where “fallen” women were punished for minor misdeeds or “sinful” life choices with slave labour and prison-like conditions, he is initially too scared to intervene. But as the snows of Christmas begin to fall, his restless conscience forces him to take a stand, even if it means rocking the boat and making enemies in his godfearing little town.
Walsh and Mielants sketch in William’s back story with intermittent flashbacks to the 1950s, when he and his mother were themselves saved from the clutches of the Magdalene sisters by a kindly family with a roomy farmhouse. For this he feels grateful – there but for the grace of God – but also guilty, and still haunted by unresolved childhood grief. These sequences are fairly conventional tear-jerkers, more overtly sentimental than Walsh’s usual elliptical understatement. But they are also some of the film’s most elegant, glowing with the nostalgic colour palette of vintage colourised postcards.
Midway through the film, Emily Watson plays a small but crucial role as Sister Mary, the all-powerful Mother Superior who effectively controls the entire town using a mix of fear, religious devotion and access to the convent school adjacent to the laundry. Conducted against a crackling fire in a creepy old ballroom, Watson’s performance has an appealing whiff of brimstone about it, a Faustian negotiation full of demonic bribes and hushed threats. Sister Mary is way more James Bond supervillain than The Sound of Music, but she arguably belongs in a more pulpy film than this minor-key art-house glumfest. Still, Watson’s Irish accent has undeniably improved since her wobbly attempts in God’s Creatures (2022).
Small Things Like These is most effective in its opening half, when William is wrestling with buried secrets, and the whole town seems gripped by nameless dread. Once the Magdalene plot becomes the central focus, the narrative risks tipping into earnest melodrama, prodding away at shockingly grim but familiar subject matter already widely covered in previous dramas and documentaries. When a minor character warns William: “those nuns have a finger in every pie,” it feels an inch away from goofy self-parody.
Cameras love the angular architecture of Murphy’s face, and we get a feast of it here: skeletally sunken cheeks, over-ripe strawberry lips, and piercing ice-blue eyes that seem forever on the verge of tears, often filling the entire screen. He is a fallen angel, Munch’s The Scream made flesh, Mads Mikkelsen with an extra layer of soulful Celtic melancholy. More reliant on pained frowns and hunched body language than spare, gruff dialogue, Murphy’s performance here is exacting and masterful, if a little mannered in places.
Mielants and his cinematographer Frank Van den Eeden also find plenty of visual poetry in Wexford’s flinty, rain-slicked streets, often bathing them in fuzzy-warm golden light. Landscapes become painterly, faces resemble charcoal sketches, drab windows becoming glistening mirrors. Senjan Janson’s softly churning score, aqueous and iridescent, reinforces this sense of ethereal otherness. Sound design plays a strong role too, especially Murphy’s rhythmic breathing, which is deployed like a recurring musical motif to emphasise William’s ever-present anxiety.
Ending with a dedication to the thousands of women who passed through Magdalene institutions before their belated closure in 1996 following a wave of scandalous revelations, Small Thing Like These is an admirably serious, frequently beautiful piece of cinema. But it may leave you craving an entirety different movie: a gonzo action bloodbath starring Emily Watson as the demonic leader of a gun-toting psycho-nun cult.
Director: Tim Mielants
Screenwriter: Enda Walsh, based on the novel by Claire Keegan
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Emily Watson, Clare Dunne, Helen Behan
Cinematography: Frank Van den Eeden
Editing: Alain Dessauvage
Music, sound design: Senjan Janson
Production design: Paki Smith
Producers: Alan Moloney, Cillian Murphy, Catherine Magee, Matt Damon, Drew Vinton
Executive producers: Ben Affleck, Kevin Halloran, Michael Joe
Production companies: Big Things Films (Ireland), Artists Equity (US)
World sales: Filmnation
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In English
96 minutes
