Jack Kelly reviews Small Things Like These, a film which is a painful exploration of Ireland’s dark past
An echoing rip, a collective scar, a wound that has long been healing, being pried open and exposed to the world once more. This is the sensation felt as the many uncomfortable truths that Small Things Like These (2024) reveals, the film hits the audience one after the other, like suckerpunches in the gut. These are truths that any of us who hail from rural Ireland have long felt the presence of. We've seen it in our grandparents' eyes, overheard mutterings by the fireside among neighbours or read the newspaper headlines.
Yet this new film, directed by Tim Mielantas and based on the critically acclaimed Claire Keegan novel of the same name, does just this. The film lays bare an era in small town Ireland, where the Catholic Church's unquestioned power results in it “having its fingers in every pie around here.” It is this omnipresence of the Church in the community’s collective psyche that results in many of the core dilemmas of the film; as it examines the abuse of power, the communities acquiescence to it, and the quest of the protagonist Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) as he tries to reconcile his past and his worldview with his present reality.
The film commences at a leisurely, nonchalant pace as we see a father, Bill, going about his regular life, eating dinner with his five daughters and working as a truck driver. The many great pains of 1980s rural Ireland start to be revealed as we observe Bill staring out from the local convent’s coal shed. He witnesses a screaming girl being dragged into the convent’s confines by her mother and a nun. Later, when Bill is dropping in an invoice, he is besieged by a girl scrubbing the floors who asks for him to bring her to the river, presumably so she can throw herself in.
It is in the convent where the reality of the situation rears its ugly head. It is a Magdalene Laundry, a depository of women and girls who gave birth to children out of marriage. They were forced into these institutions in order to serve penance for their supposed ‘sins’, whilst being subject to inhumane abuses from the Church.
Throughout this descent into the grim realities of this rural town, director Tim Mielants perfectly intercuts scenes from Bill’s childhood, where we learn that he had been born out of wedlock to a maid in the estate of a woman named Mrs.Wilson (Michelle Fairley). Unusual for that time, Mrs. Wilson took in young Bill (Louis Kirwan) and kept on his mother (Agnes O’Casey), caring for them both.
It is in the convent where most of the film unfolds. On another delivery to the coal shed Billy first encounters Sarah (Zara Devlin), a shivering woman who has been deposited in this horrific, freezing, shed by the nuns. Upon taking Sarah inside the convent Billy is taken into the sinister Sister Mary's (Emily Watson) plush office, in which the full magnitude of the Church's power is demonstrated. She does this through her manipulation and subtle threats, an exemplar of how the church retained its iron grip over the community through fear. Billy leaves Sarah here, naively reassured that she is being taken care of.
The film's conclusion is compelling and excruciating in equal measure. We witness the psychological toll that being privy to the Church's abuse has on Billy. The moral battle that he is encountering, him knowing that he escaped the horrors of this institution on the whim of others kindness, where turning his cheek is causing him excruciating internal pain. It is the simple choice of doing what is easy or doing what he knows to be right. He cannot keep his head down and get by as everyone else in the community seems content to do.
From the very first scene, Small Things Like These enthrals the audience through its stark settings and beautifully woven tale of a man's reckoning with his morality, in the face of a terrible power. It pulls at the watcher's heartstrings from the outset, providing many uncomfortable answers that point right back at the audience.