Film Review by Steve Carey of the film based on Claire Keegan’s novella
The Film is directed by Tim Mielants, adapted by Enda Walsh, starring Cillian Murphy (also producer), Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Emily Watson, Clare Dunne and Helen Behan. 2024
Church bells ring out across a gloomy New Ross, County Wexford. Black crows caw. It’s 1985, money is tight for coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and their five daughters. Christmas is coming, and, with it, additional expense and pressure.
Something is up with Bill, and Eileen can’t get him to talk. It looks very much like depression or PTSD, the unresolved grief of being first an illegitimate son of a single mother and then an orphan. There is a more immediate cause, too, Bill’s visits to the local convent and Magdalene laundry, where he cannot avoid seeing the girls.
Eileen’s concern is to take care of her own. It is none of our business, she tells him. ‘What do we have to answer for?’ she asks. But Bill can’t shake the thought that his own mother only avoided such a fate through the kindness of the lady of the big house where she was working. He owes his very existence to her. Where does such responsibility stop?
The world of the film is a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, and yet no-one ever speaks of what happens just down the road. There is a conspiracy of silence, and perhaps it is Bill’s grief and trauma that drives him to action. The convent’s Mother Superior (Emily Watson) shows Bill both carrot and stick: she asks after the girls, pointedly observing that finding places in the school next door for all of them isn’t easy, before she stuffs fifty pounds into a Christmas card for Eileen. Bill is trapped between being unable to turn away and unable to act.
With a screenplay by Enda Walsh and based on Claire Keegan’s short, unforgettable 2021 novella, Small Things Like These is unexpectedly reminiscent of the Netflix four parter Adolescence (2025), in that the slight story concerns children and stays with you long after it’s over, in part through the technical approach to cinematography. Adolescence shoots each episode in a single uninterrupted take, without any editing; Small Things achieves a similar claustrophobic power through being filmed entirely on location. Both build tension and never give us the chance to look away, knowing that worse is to come. Bill’s laboured breathing becomes the soundtrack to our own tension.
The difference, of course, is that while shooting in a single take is hugely expensive, shooting on location saves money: necessity is the mother of invention. Murphy, who produces, pitched the project to his fellow performer Matt Damon from Oppenheimer (2023), an adaptation suggested by Murphy’s wife Yvonne McGuinness, and one wonders whether without Murphy’s box office draw and Damon’s Artists Equity backing the film could have been made, even on a modest budget of perhaps AU$5m. Indeed, there is a danger that we’re distracted by the astonishing geometry of Murphy’s face from the movie’s concern with, as the credits disclose, the 56,000 – 56,000! – women and girls sent to the Magdalene Laundries for ‘penance and rehabilitation’ between 1922 and 1998 – 1998! – and the children taken from them.
How does it end? You’ll need to overcome your qualms and see it for yourself, and you’ll be glad you did. Small Things isn’t easy watching, and raises uncomfortable and important questions about collaboration and looking the other way. It is easy to condemn the whole system for its abuses, but one of the most haunting scenes is Bill witnessing a mother pushing her terrified teenage daughter into the doorway of the convent and the waiting clutch of a nun: such a system, it says, cannot exist without compliance from the community.
Steve Carey is a regular contributor to Tinteán.
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