Small Things Like These – Film Review

I’d read Claire Keegan’s Booker nominated novel Small Thinks Like These and absolutely loved it – so I went to the movie that was adapted from book with some trepidation, wondering if it would capture its essence or would it be lost in translation. But hey, I’m Irish and Cillian Murphy is easy on the eye …

Small Things Like These takes place over Christmas in 1985, in the small town of New Ross, Southern Ireland. It’s not your typical Christmas movie – there’s lots of poverty and hardship, loss, love, identity and family.

Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer and the Peaky Blinders) produces the film and stars as the quiet and melancholic Bill Furlong, who can’t look anyone in the eye. He is married and a devoted father of five daughters and works as a coal merchant. While delivering coal to the local convent he discovers a young woman locked in the coal shed.

The film reveals the dark and long-repressed secrets about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. These were horrific institutions run by the Roman Catholic church from 1820- 1996, to ostensibly reform ‘fallen young women’, a vague term used to refer to girls and women who had children out of wedlock. These unfortunate Irish girls and women (approximately 56,000 of them) were forced into unpaid labour in Roman Catholic institutions throughout Ireland.

Flashbacks to Bill’s own childhood haunt him. He was born to an unmarried sixteen year old mother, who was cut off by her own family. Bill didn’t know his father. Mrs Wilson, a protestant widow and land owner, took them in and employed his mother. Bill’s mother died when he was 12 and there was no father’s name on his birth certificate, so he took his mother’s name.

In New Ross, Bill encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the church. This timid man is pitted against the unblinking and devious Mother Superior, played brilliantly by Emily Watson.

Bill Furlong is a compassionate human being and his moral obligation of showing kindness to a stranger, is similar to the kindness his mother received. Without it, she would probably have ended up at the convent. We never discover the consequences of his act of kindness.

Directed by Tim Mielants, most of the movie is filmed in the dark or inside. Crows roost in the convent’s trees, greedy black scavengers symbolic of corruption in the convent. It’s slow moving with minimal dialogue but delivers a powerful message in human decency.

This movie won’t be ‘everyone’s cup of tea’ but I loved it and score it 8/10.

Small Things Like These opens on 10 April, 2025 in Luna cinemas.

By Jean Hudson

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