Adapted from Claire Keegan’s novella by Enda Walsh, Small Things Like These, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contains multitudes.
A deep-dive character study anchored by Cillian Murphy’s fiercely internalised performance, Tim Mielant’s film is quietly emblematic of a changing Ireland.
Cultural markers from the 1980s – Danger Mouse on TV, The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me playing in the pub – are jolting in a setting that, in aspect and attitudes, could pass for the 1950s.
Bill Furlong (Murphy) is a tender-hearted coal man delivering fuel around New Ross. Every evening he returns home, washes the black dust from under his fingernails and helps his five daughters with their homework.
At night, however, he sits silently, sometimes crying, in the darkness. Flashbacks reveal that Bill was born outside marriage; his mother’s kindly employer, Mrs Wilson (Michelle Fairley), saved her from certain ruin.
Bill’s regular patrons include the local Good Shepherd convent, the site of a Magdalene laundry, where dozens of unfortunate women are trapped in servitude indefinitely.
Where The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan’s coruscating Venice Golden Lion winner from 2002, focused on the “fallen women” of the title, Mielant places them in the shadowy margins.
Bill’s reckoning is a process. He watches in horror as a young woman is dragged, screaming and crying, from her parents’ car. A series of similarly themed and bruising vignettes shake him to the core. His pragmatic wife (Eileen Walsh) tells him not to get involved.
“If you want to get on in this life,” she says, “there are things you have to ignore.”
A local publican, Mrs Kehoe (Helen Behan), warns Bill that the nuns have “a hand in everything that goes on in the town”. The terrifying mother superior (Emily Watson) reminds Bill that his eldest daughters attend her convent school.
Frank van den Eeden’s dark, wintry cinematography can err on the side of murk, save for storefronts that remind us, against the gloom, that it’s Christmas time. In delicate movements, the miserabilism of Small Things Like These coalesces into a wonderfully understated seasonal catharsis.
In cinemas from Friday, November 1st
