Small Things Like These (2024)

Cillian Murphy- perhaps discovered for the first time by cinematic heathens last year during Oppenheimer- continues his remarkable career with this extremely low-key Irish drama in which he plays Bill, a coal-man in County Wexford in the mid 1980's. Adapted from Claire Keegan's 2020 novel, Small Things Like These tackles- or rather approaches- the horrific subject of Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries, the last of which only shut its doors in 1998.

Bill lives with his wife Eileen (a superb Eileen Walsh) and their many daughters, all of which go to the local school run by the church. The school building shares its walls with the convent/laundry, itself run by the nuns that teach Bill's daughters, and the horrors of what goes on behind the walls of the laundry are left up to people's imagination- or rather the opposite; everyone is aware of what goes on but they stay quiet, because the church runs the town (and for a long time, the country itself).

Set over one Christmas in 1985, Bill is struggling with something; he's waking up every night and sitting by the window contemplating his own memories, and indeed the family's future. We share Bill's flashbacks to his childhood where we learn his Mum brought him up on his own with the help of an older woman and it's implied that without the help that his Mum received she would almost certainly have ended up in one of the Launderettes.

For the uninitiated going into this film blind, these laundries essentially become the home to young woman who fell pregnant outside of wedlock for whatever reason- frequently forced there by their own parents, and worked to the bone by merciless nuns whilst their babies were taken away from them. They were primarily Catholic institutions but it's important to point out that they were initially a protestant creation. Here, in 1985 Wexford, it's demonstrably a Catholic affair in a country still run by the Catholic Church for the most part, only six years after Pope John Paul II's iconic visit to Ireland. During the Pope's homily at a mass held in Dublin's Phoenix Park, he warned of the dangers facing the country in the future, and from a pre-Vatican Catholic belief it's hard to think of how far Ireland has strayed from that path, especially in 2024.

It's impossible however to deny that with regard to things like the Magdalene Laundries, the country has moved on for the better. Ireland's cultural and political problems with regards to power are now so removed from the Catholic Church's stranglehold it's easy to forget that negatives the country currently has to deal with potentially wouldn't exist if it had remained in such power. Such a claim is subjective of course, but the fact that many now believe that subjectivity doesn't exist when it comes to political power means that some who rightly castigate appalling crimes of the Catholic Church also hypocritically preach an opinion without allowing others to have one- the exact sort of attitude the Church once (and still does) wielded to such horrifying effect.

One day while Bill is delivering coal to the convent, he discovers a girl locked in the coal shed. He knows who put her there, we know who put her there- and while he's clearly shaken, he lets himself be taken in to a meeting with the tyrannical Church Sister (a cold and calculating Emily Watson) who forces the girl to admit that some of the other girls locked her in whilst playing a game. He then takes a Christmas card filled with cash from the Sister, and despite his clear hesitation, accepts it. It's arguably the difference between a nice Christmas and a worrisome one, and both Bill and the Sister know exactly what this is; cash in exchange for Bill's silence over what he may or may not have seen.

The mood of the town is summed up later on when the local pub landlord offers him some friendly advice; word has got round he's been causing trouble by not turning a blind eye to the girl in the coal shed. Say nothing, stay out of trouble, look the other way. Even his wife suggests that the girls in the convent aren't his problem, they're not his daughters. The convent looms large over the town, almost like Dracula's castle, such is the awe and fear that it seems to breathe.

Small Things Like These is minimal to an extreme, a far cry from the brash and raw depiction of a laundry in Peter Mullan's excellent and hard-hitting The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and we're clearly in a different ball park from the light hearted (yet moving) territory of Philomena (2013). The film leaves more questions than answers, and I would have liked to have seen the full force of the Church exposed- but to explain why exactly that is here would give away plot spoilers. The nuanced approach of the story works well, and the performances (especially Murphy) keep you absorbed in the tightly wound setting of the film, and it leaves a menacing and troublesome feeling clinging to you throughout.

Small Things Like These doesn't hit the heights of another Keegan adaptation- 2022's astonishing The Quiet Girl, but then again not a single film in 2022 did, so that's not much of a knock-back. Worth the admission for Murphy alone, this is an impressive snapshot of a time and place.

This is rural Ireland in the eighties, a juncture some would still argue was part of the Dark Ages; a time when public opinion was irrelevant and people had to toe the line and thinking of behemoth institutions, organisations, or movements to which they all gave money to and kept quiet, for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing whilst atrocities went on right at their doorsteps. But that was the narrative of the time- to step outside and voice a differing opinion, however rational, was to go against the grain and could lose you your job, your house, your livelihood.

Thankfully in 2024, these are things we don't have to worry about. Oh....... 7.7/10