SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE (2024)

For non-Irish audiences, it’s difficult to convey the scope of the Catholic Church’s influence in Irish society in the 20th-century. As one of the characters correctly asserts to the protagonist of Small Things Like These, Bill (Cillian Murphy), the Church has ‘their thumb in every pie’. Just about every important facet of social strata in the country was connected to the Catholic Church, facilitating an environment where sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy was rampant. This story isn’t a uniquely Irish one; it was commonplace in almost every country with a significant Catholic cultural influence. Tom McCarthy’s Academy Award-winning film Spotlight (2015), for example, focuses on how the Church was able to protect abusers within its ranks throughout Boston, with its closing title cards conveying just how widespread this issue was throughout much of the world.

But the Magdalene Laundries, which is the focus of Small Things Like These, is a more uniquely Irish story, and no less tragic than the well-known cases of abuse worldwide in the Church’s past. The laundries were devised to house ‘fallen women’, a term usually denoted to unmarried pregnant women and sex workers. Essentially, any woman who transgressed social norms at the time could be sent either to the laundries themselves or the reformatories that served as off-shoots of this institution, with this method of containment and concealment spreading throughout the 20th-century. Despite its stated goal of reforming these women of their supposed ills, permanent, unpaid workers were desired. Though the women admitted weren’t forced to enter, they were often treated like prisoners during their time there by the nuns who ran this institution, where abusive behaviour was rampant at the hands of these religious leaders.

This is the fate that could have befallen Bill’s mother Sarah (Agnes O’Casey), were she not lucky enough to be taken in by Mrs Wilson (Michelle Fairley), a wealthy local woman who ends up raising Bill after Sarah’s death at a young age. This unmarried woman could have easily been coerced into entering the laundries, with social pressure towards these women being so fierce that they would willingly sign away their rights and accept mistreatment. As for Bill, his fate would be like that of so many of the children in these situations, whose ability to interact with their mothers in their first few months was limited before attempts were made by the nuns to sell them, sometimes to couples unable to conceive, another taboo at the time in conservative Catholic society. Many children sold in these cases never saw their mother again or came to know their name. That would have been a merciful fate at the time: babies that died in these places were often buried in unmarked graves nearby, with some of these deaths being attributed to severe neglect.

On the surface, Bill should be content with his life. His career as a coal merchant might be tough, often thankless work, but it provides for himself, his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh), and their five young daughters. The eldest two attend a secondary school beside a convent, which contains a training school and a laundry. It’s here, as Bill is delivering coal on one of his many stops throughout the day, that he witnesses a young woman begging her mother not to make her enter the convent. A nun arrives a few moments later to drag the young woman inside. Bill, almost hiding as he stands huddled in the doorway, looks frozen with fear, caught between what he wants to do and what he knows he will do.

It would seem that questions related to his father, who he scarcely knew and will never see again, have weighed heavily on Bill’s mind all his life. But it’s only recently that it has been truly plaguing him, resulting in sleepless nights and listless stares at nothing at all, caught in a paralysing stir of unwelcome emotions. Flashbacks from his childhood perforate his typical routine, with the present-day and childhood scenes alike being portrayed in a slow, contemplative style. Though some viewers might find the film’s commitment to depicting the day-to-day activities of this protagonist’s life dull, these scenes perfectly set up the ambience of Bill’s existence, where one can fill in the gaps as to what his routine typically looks like. Without these set-ups, audiences wouldn’t be able to see how shaken he is by his complicity in a form of systemic abuse that has been accepted by everyone around him.

Then again, this core aspect of the story is just as influenced by Cillian Murphy’s commanding leading performance. There is very little dialogue throughout Small Things Like These, which amplifies the tension embedded in this story and the weight of its spoken interactions, but this also makes it clear just how phenomenal Murphy’s portrayal of a deeply conflicted man is. Audiences will already have seen this in effect in his leading role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), but here he outdoes that excellent performance, communicating sorrow so effortlessly and profoundly that it is stirring to watch him silently try to make sense of a world that won’t cohere around reason or basic humanity.

The flashback scenes are perfectly composed, never feeling cheap or overdone. Director Tim Mielants is especially skilled at drawing out the abject pain that even the simplest of disappointments can provoke in children, as well as in making that pain so easy to understand that one can feel that the whole world rests on young Bill’s (Louis Kirwan) attempts to compose himself after he didn’t receive the Christmas present he asked for. But Mielants’ greatest talents are conveyed in the present-day scenes, where the psychic trauma of Bill’s past, like the dark shadows cast by the Catholic Church’s abuses, still looms large. Just as modern Ireland must reckon with this wrongdoing, Bill is forced to contend with his own psyche, which continually invites him to step back into the days of his childhood, and which can evoke the strongest of emotions from something as simple as seeing a jigsaw puzzle.

For as great as this slow-burn drama is, which gives plenty of room for these characters to confront the evils around them—making the film all the more angering for how willing they are to ignore it—Small Things Like These enters truly transcendent territory once Bill makes a vital discovery by the convent. From hereon in the movie is incredibly riveting, perfectly capturing the tension between Bill and the nuns, whose entitlement and aggression easily overpower this protagonist. Since Bill is known to have been conceived through ‘sin’, he is essentially marked with a black stain he can never rub off in the eyes of these ‘pious’ women. In their presence, as in many scenes where Bill removes himself from the outside world to contend with thoughts of the past, it is as if he has become a scared boy once more. Or that he has never stopped being one.

With excellent cinematography and direction that draws you into the inner lives of these characters and the cruel world they inhabit, Small Things Like These is immensely hopeful and profoundly sad. A visceral depiction of the cruelty inflicted on its women, not only does it never exploit their pain, it also doesn’t seek to create clichéd monsters out of their abusers. Even in banal conversation the nuns, particularly the more polite and presentable Mother Superior Sister Mary (Emily Watson), are terrifying without needing to stoop to theatrics. Instead, much of the focus here is on everyday citizens, many of them decent, God-fearing people, who willingly turn a blind eye to the abuse lingering so close to them.

But just as this film brilliantly stirs up feelings of anger and helplessness whilst watching it, Small Things Like These also demonstrates how simple and effective kindness can be, and how beautiful it is to step outside of a morally bankrupt society’s norms and try to make a difference. Even something as brief as a look can be a silent confirmation of hope and humanity for someone undergoing extreme mistreatment. As I watched the final minutes of this film, it was as if time had stopped for everything outside of the fictional world presented on the screen. It is these urgent moments that make cinema feel alive, and storytelling infinitely rich.

Small Things Like These might not be an easy watch—its pacing is slow, the lives it depicts are quaint, and it doesn’t provide explanations for its wider cultural context or many of the specifics of the laundries’ functions—but it’s a deeply moving, urgent tale that demands to be seen. Its final shot, understated yet profound, ends on the perfect note. You want so much to see more of these characters’ lives, just as you want so much for this world to have been just a little brighter. It is left for you to decide if that could have been possible back then, and whether it is more merciful not to show viewers the aftermath of this moment. Regardless of the answers one comes away with, this film is just as beautiful as it is heart-wrenching.

IRELAND • BELGIUM • USA | 2024 | 98 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Tim Mielants.
writer: Enda Walsh (based on the book by Claire Keegan).
starring: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Zara Devlin, Emily Watson, Michelle Fairley, Louis Kirwan, Agnes O’Casey & Mark McKenna.