Small Things Like These Review: Cillian Murphy is wrenching as a haunted, conflicted rebel in 80s Ireland drama

Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These (2024) opens in 1980s Ireland. The small town of New Ross has the air of perfect, settled calm, everything being right in its place. Bill Furlong(Cillian Murphy), a coalman, has a modest but warm family life with his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters. Eileen chides him for being too soft-hearted; he generously gives away change to anyone who might be in need, vulnerable. After all, they have a load of expenses to consider, though their daughters’ education is taken care of by the church. Nevertheless, as Eileen frets, there라이브 바카라 a long line of marriages to be dealt with. Bill is somewhat adrift, his mind elsewhere, increasingly perturbed by the goings-on at the local convent.

This adaptation of Claire Keegan라이브 바카라 eponymous Booker-shortlisted novella uses a creeping sense of insinuation and doubt to crack open an ugly, rotten system, a historical moment in Ireland that co-opted everyone. Woven around the Magdalene laundries—a repressive asylum for ‘fallen’ women—the film works as an interruption of a history that라이브 바카라 hushed, brushed under the carpet. The complicity of the State in backing these religious institutions gave a free pass to society itself in arranging itself around what served the Church well. Every evening, after he is back home from work, rigorously scrubbing his hands of the coal residues, Bill struggles to fully associate with his family. He라이브 바카라 always lost even while he tries being present and attentive to his children. In a brooding, tightly internalized performance suffused with quietly racing conflicts, Murphy holds the key to this subtle, profoundly humane drama. Bill grows intensely invested in the fate of the girls at the convent but everyone around him is tight-lipped.

Murphy is absolutely spectacular, soulfully plumbing without a trace of showy tics. This is an actor comfortable in inhabiting silence, trusting us to follow his gaze alone and map out unspoken details, the doldrums within. I haven’t read the novella but Enda Walsh라이브 바카라 screenplay wholly relies on spare, telling exchanges, extracting histories and implications from a shard of a flashback, the stab of a concerned glance that wants to veer away but remains arrested. Bill라이브 바카라 dilemma places him at a position where his lived experience, lessons learnt therein clash with the advice others make, including his wife. Murphy traces every note in Bill라이브 바카라 silent, rassling anguish, squaring for the courage to go against the grain knowing the jeopardy involved.

Bill is constantly cautioned to keep to himself, his family, stick to his business. Eileen reminds him they have their plates already full. The nuns are influential, you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of such people—this is what is pressed on him. Too much is at stake, including the education of his girls. Something might just as well befall him and his family if he intrudes. There라이브 바카라 danger in his meddling, the degree of which he might be utterly unprepared to confront.

Yet he cannot shake off the nagging feeling that he must poke around, intervene, do his bit at least for this girl who calls out to him. It has to do with the support and kindness he himself received as a kid from a stranger. He saw his mother being distraught and struggling to fend for the two of them, his father nowhere on the scene.

Bill is caught up in his memories surging back. The convent girls’ desperation, the feeling of being left out in the cold with little shelter or hope strike echoes from his past. He recognizes residues of his mother라이브 바카라 helplessness in them, as they appear like slaves with all their desires and agency stripped. It라이브 바카라 as if their personhood itself has been cast into aspersion. Every time he edges closer, he라이브 바카라 pushed out, the lines drawn between. One of the most unnerving scenes unfolds when he meets Sister Mary (Emily Watson) who presides over the convent. Within few minutes, keeping her voice measured and low, Watson inspires terror as someone who makes it instantly clear to Bill he must hold back from inciting her. The limits are established, power exerted. Watson is glacial and chilling as her Mary puts forth a deal that will ensure the continued collusion of the community.

Yet Bill dares to resist. In Small Things Like These, DP Frank Van den Eeden captures a lot of the local bustle, but the churning isolation of Bill in his beliefs, his beleaguered conscience occupies center frame. This superbly controlled, quietly tense drama has tragedy and suffering at its core. Nevertheless it moves towards a smidgen of hope and grace, a radical possibility of breaking a vicious spell illuminated in Bill라이브 바카라 solitary act of assertion. Small Things Like These is a small, assured and moving gem.

Small Things Like These screened at the Habitat International Film Festival 2025.