Small Things Like These (2024)

Understated yet powerful piece of one man's conscience - Small Things Like These review by PD

An adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella by the same name, Tim Mielants’s film is a sombre, understated account of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, institutions which housed so-called “fallen women” from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. Operating under the guise of consolation, these laundries were essentially workhouses for sex workers, promiscuous girls, and young women who became pregnant out of wedlock, who were forced to engage in gruelling labour as punishment.

The film is set in the modest town of New Ross in 1985 and follows Bill Furlong (Cilliam Murphy - compelling throughout), a somewhat dejected coal merchant who lives with his wife Eileen and their five daughters. He spends his days toting coal in a canary-coloured truck, often to the local convent, where he is increasingly alarmed by his observations. After entering the convent to follow up on an invoice, an adolescent girl scrubbing the floors wails for Bill to help her escape to a nearby river. When he later shares his apprehensions with Eileen, she encourages him to drop the subject. “If you want to get on in this life, there are things we have to ignore,” she says - the film is excellent at revealing how personal and social pressure counsels him against speaking out, lest the powerful church turn against his business, his family and himself. This is, of course, how Ireland’s national scandal of the Magdalene laundries was allowed to survive, abusing tens of thousands of women who became pregnant outside marriage and their children, but both Keegan’s book and Walsh’s script are also interested in exploring the silence around the scandal, the forces that kept people from speaking out, or even seeing that anything was wrong. Even in the film’s biggest confrontation, with Emily Watson’s Mother Superior – as thuggishly self-assured as any Mafia don and just as ruthless – Bill holds himself still and somehow curled in on himself, and yet you can’t look away.

Meanwhile, flashbacks to a posh home at Christmastime gradually reveal how Bill was personally implicated in the existence of Magdalene laundries as a child and how his past trauma bleeds into the present. While his character is certainly admirable, there is something to be noted of a history of gendered violence accessed through the conscience of a benevolent man – that the laundries exist as peripheral action to Bill contending with his unremitting memory. There is a sense of foreboding and secrecy to the entire project, with the dialogue mostly communicated in whispers and the characters exchanging stern glances at any mention of the convent. In lieu of sensationalising the persecution of these young women, the film compellingly casts its gaze onto the complicity of the community and the social architectures which uphold abuse. Often slow-moving or repetitious – there is a recurring gesture of Bill strenuously washing his dirty hands – the film adopts the bleak sensibility of this history, ultimately advancing the belief that we ought to welcome the subjugated and vulnerable into our homes – a message we'd do well to receive, the final credits reminding us that the tradition carried on in Ireland until 1996. Powerful stuff.

Powerful & Sad Drama - Small Things Like These review by GI

This is a melancholy and at times painfully sad film with an incredible central performance from Cillian Murphy. Set in the early 1980s in Ireland where Murphy plays Bill, a coal merchant who has a moderately successful business. He's a quiet, introspective family man with a wife and several daughters who are all educated courtesy of the local church. Bill is haunted by some childhood memories which are built up through flashbacks and chiefly concern his mother. Bill is constantly moved by the visions of severe poverty he sees around him. Things come to a head one Christmas when he's delivering fuel to the town convent and inadvertently he witnesses the abuse inflicted on the young women who are forced to live there because they had a child out of wedlock. The tyrannical mother superior (Icily portrayed by Emily Watson) realises that he now has possession of a secret that could harm her and makes moves to ensure he stays silent but good hearted Bill makes a decision that could threaten his family. There's a Dickensian feel to this film that is thoroughly absorbing, so much so that when the film ends it takes you by surprise. This is a story of the infamous Magdalene Laundries scandal that was a well kept secret in Ireland for many decades where young women were subjected to a life of relative slavery all because they violated the strict rules of the Catholic Church. A slow burning, powerful film and highly recommended.