Dark habits: "Small Things Like These"

Cillian Murphy has now reached such a level of stardom that his first venture post-Oppenheimer, an independently produced drama on the subject of the Magdalene laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland, is presently outperforming awards season heavy-hitters like this year's Palme d'Or winner Anora and Steve McQueen's Blitz. I'm reviewing Small Things Like These later than expected, in part because two earlier public screenings I'd aimed to attend sold out, suggesting widespread fascination with either the subject matter or the source material (Claire Keegan's Booker-nominated 2021 novel, here adapted for the screen by Enda Walsh). Or - more likely - it was some combination of these and the growing draw of Murphy, again found burrowing assiduously yet unflashily beneath a character's skin. A coalman in rural Wexford in the last years when coalman was still a viable profession (the early-to-mid 1980s), Murphy's Bill Furlong is a generous, loving husband and father and responsible, hard-working citizen, one of the little people who keep a nation going. Yet as Tim Mielants' film joins Bill, it's also clear that something's not right. The guy can't sleep at night; he's distracted at the dinner table; and his tendency to disconnect and drift off indicates he has something weighty and urgent on his mind, the kind of concerns cameras and flashbacks were invented to reveal. Keegan previously authored the novel The Quiet Girl, source of one of the biggest sleeper hits in recent Irish cinema. Small Things Like These, which bears out a similar methodology, would invite rechristening as The Quiet Man, were that title not already taken.

What's been set around Bill Furlong is in itself the definition of muted. Mielants, the Belgian who made the terrific nudist-camp character study Patrick and worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders, makes choices that forever point towards the titular diminutions. A narrow frame, the better to describe narrow, penned-in lives; the fast-fading light of November, December and January; lots of peering through windows at rooms that sorely need coal to sustain any brightness or warmth. Two decades ago, the actor-turned-director Peter Mullan enjoyed a crossover hit with The Magdalene Sisters, a period drama on the same topic that was never less than grabby, often punchy, and in places bordered on exploitation. Mielants' film, by contrast, is insistently recessive; its primary sites of interest and conflict aren't the laundries but the hollows under Murphy's eyes and cheekbones. Crucially, we follow the actor into these dark places: as we see and hear what Bill does, we come to know what he does, and thus better understand the OCD-level handwashing and panic attacks. We, too, feel the chill as the dead of winter blows in. The box-office success comes as an even greater surprise once you've seen the film, which is a far tougher proposition than the sunny, genial The Quiet Girl: the distributors have had to prioritise stars over quotes on the poster because, as critical recommendations go, "bleak and unsparing" doesn't sell tickets, even prefixed with a mitigating "admirably". Looking round at the pensioners cramming into my Saturday matinee, I was struck by one more thing, which may be no small thing indeed: has the Church done so much damage over the years that folks gravitate to a film like this to help them navigate their own traumas?

Small Things Like These is now playing in selected cinemas.