Small Things like These

Tim Midlands’s Small Things Like These is a heavy, distressing watch—involving flashbacks about a troubled childhood—but it also offers levels of courage that resonate thanks to a devoted, soul-searching performance by Cillian Murphy, in which this marks his first movie since winning his Best Lead Actor performance in last year’s Oppenheimer. Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and devoted family man who works hard to make a living. The holidays are approaching, but there is personal affliction that begins to sink in that leads to Bill’s wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) to notice some repressed anxiety starting to kick in. Bill was raised by a single mother, and they lived on scarce income as his mother was ostracized by her family for being a single mother but permitted to work as a wealthy and independent landowner. Bill has painful childhoods of not having good Christmas’s where his mom couldn’t afford gifts or celebrate Christmas other families were able to. We see Bill hold this in; he can sleep, and he stays up all night with haunting thoughts.

One early, after a failed night of rest, Bill ends up delivering coal to a local Catholic covenant. He discovers a pregnant teenage girl, Sara (Zara Devlin), locked up in the shed in severely cold temperatures. He quickly ushers her back into the covenant, in which the nuns falsely claim she was locked in them by other girls while playing a game of hide and seek. The covenant’s Mother Superior, Sister Mary (Emily Watson), who often plays innocent and inviting characters, is quite ominous and cunning in her performance. She is very passive, aggressive, and persuasive, and her authority holds an overriding power. She asks Bill about his family and attempts to gaslight what he observed as a misunderstanding and is skewed, and that it can prevent many girls from getting proper boarding, education, and housing. She also attempts to bribe him with a Christmas card filled with cash.

Courtesy Lions Gate Films

This connects back to Bill’s own childhood, in which so many good people set back and allowed bad things to happen. Tom ends up sticking to his guns and finds the courage to not standby and allow abuse to go by. As you watch it, you think of the 2003 film The Magdelene Sisters, in which this film also plays off the horrors and abuse young women in the United Kingdom suffered through during the 60s all the way until the 80s. Bill plays out like he is a detective, gathering evidence to validate the certainty of what he observed as he struggles with his own depressions. It’s based on the historical nonfiction novel of the same name by Clair Keegan, and the adapted screenplay is written by Irish playwright Edna Wash, and the film holds a personal touch, as if each collaborator was giving a gateway into their own heart and soul. Bill’s journey begins melancholy and vulnerable, and his courage very much earns the film’s story arc.

Right away, there are internal struggles throughout Murphy’s character and performance. While Bill begins to sort it out, he reaches an emotional equilibrium, showing a greater purpose in how we should never stay complicit in other people’s suffering. And while it takes place during Christmas, the use of coal in the film is used quite wisely, as we forget that the holiday season should be about less materialistic possessions and more about caring for others that are more misfortunate. Admittedly, the film’s structure of flashbacks to Bill’s afflicted childhood doesn’t entirely work, and some of the pacing feels sluggish, but the second half that involves the exchanges between Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson adds many emotional layers to the film, in which Watson’s nun character of Sister Mary is every bit as corrupt as any organized crime boss you would see onscreen. There’s no denying that the dramatic impact the film holds, and hopefully more modern film buffs and fans of last year’s Oppenheimer who embraced Cillian Murphy’s Oscar-winning performance will seek this dramatically satisfying film out. Thís film once again assures the power of Murphy’s skill as a great actor. There are many indies that deserve more attention from audiences, and this is one of them.

Small Things like These is now playing in theaters