Review: Small Things Like These
by Mary Yerina
After the epic film Oppenheimer garnered Cillian Murphy the Oscar for Best Actor, his turn to a small-budget, independent film could not be more dramatic. Small Things Like These is based on Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel about a Magdalene laundry in a 1980s small Irish town.
Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a well-respected and hard-working coal merchant with a loving wife and five daughters. The opening scenes follow Bill through the town of New Ross while he makes deliveries. It sets the tone for bleakness and limited dialogue throughout the film. Through flashbacks, we learn of Bill’s childhood as the son of a young, single mother who was ostracized by her family when she became pregnant. Instead of being committed to the local convent for “reflection on and repentance of her sins,” Sarah Furlong was taken in by and worked respectably for independent-thinking and wealthy landowner, Mrs. Wilson, who raised Bill after the tragic death of his mother.
Bill’s reflections become more pronounced as he witnesses a young boy scrounging for firewood along a country road, then drinking milk from a cat’s bowl at night. During his deliveries to the convent, he sees a young woman being forced into convent by her parents and early one morning, he finds another young woman locked in the coal shed. As he internally questions the foundations of his life, he is aware that his livelihood and his daughter’s educations are at risk in a town where the convent and church hold the seats of power.
This existential crisis plays out in the face of Murphy. It is an outstanding, quiet performance and carries the film to its hopeful conclusion with his assuring smile. The supporting cast is strong – most notably, Emily Watson as Sister Mary, the controlling and corrupt Mother Superior of the convent. Murphy also served as a first-time producer under his company, Big Things Films, which is focused on telling stories that “speak to the human experience.”
Small Things Like These speaks to an inhumane experience of so many women from the 1920s through the 1990s. Unlike The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013), it does so from the perspective of a young boy/grown man who, in a way, also was a victim of the convent laundries. It is a story that needs to be told even if it is hard to hear.