'Small Things Like These' Review: A Sorrowful Disappointment
After last year’s sweeping awards cycle, Cillian Murphy returns to the screen as producer and starring actor in Small Things Like These, directed by Tim Mielants and adapted from Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel. Murphy is expectedly riveting as Bill Furlong, a disquieted coal merchant and father of five girls living in a small Irish town in 1985. It’s through him that audiences breathe in the freezing morning air, notice the lowering of women’s gazes, and hear the lurching protests of girls being dragged into the town’s convent. However, it is precisely because of this gaze that the film falls short. Frustratingly, Small Things Like These sidesteps the voices of women in their own traumatic history, favouring the saviour narrative of Bill Furlong – riveting performance and all.
The film takes place throughout the Christmas holidays, with snow laden cobblestones and dim, yellow lighting warming the soft, cinematic setting. Atmosphere is everything here: communicating Bill’s inner monologue as he stares out of windows, at his hands, at his feet. He’s already struggling to move through his daily routine as a coal merchant when we first meet him, but it becomes increasingly complicated when he spots a girl being dragged by her mother into the town’s convent. From here on out, Bill becomes slowly undone as his own childhood traumas return to him and the mystery of the nuns’ actions begins to unravel.
The film toys with the structure of mystery, but some audiences should be very quick to identify what is occurring on screen. Small Things Like These concerns the scandal of the Magdalene Laundries, where the Catholic Church kept an estimated 30,000 girls as ‘fallen women’ throughout their pregnancy. The institutions were secretive and horribly abusive, leading to years of harrowing pain for the women of the community as well as an unknown number of deaths.
There is, however, a further mystery to uncover. Bill’s traumatic past returns to him in waves throughout the film, offering clues to his depression and motivations in acting against the local convent. We learn that his mother was a ‘fallen woman’ but was fortunate enough to be taken in by her rich employer, awarding them the privilege of survival. It is his own mother that he sees in one of the girls kept at the convent. We know this because, serendipitously, they share the same first name. The salvation of this convent girl becomes Bill’s sole motivation as all the women in his life (his wife and a pub owner) beg him to leave it be, thereby avoiding the wrath of the all-powerful church.
Let me pause to note the positives in this film. Again, Cillian Murphy delivers such a powerful portrayal of Bill that we almost forget to question why his character is so central to this narrative in the first place. The rest of the cast are also fantastic, particularly Emily Wilson as the terrifying Sister Mary, icon of the Church’s evildoings. The atmosphere is incredible, with its suffocating snowy landscapes and moments of reprieve in the warm familial home. So much of this film occurs inside of Bill’s head, a narrative we are not privy to, that the atmosphere had to be great. I was amazed (and chilled) by one particular sequence in which Bill first steps foot into the convent’s further hallways. As the camera weaves through the rooms, more and more girls are revealed with their tired faces and tattered uniforms, slowly broadening our understanding of the true horrific scale of these operations. The way it made my stomach drop, it could have been a scene in a horror film.
However, the gaping problem here is that all of this occurs through Bill and his specific capability for agency. It is a historic truth that at this time that a man may have been the only one capable of doing anything to combat these evils. But the film positions Bill’s trauma, which is revealed to be lacklustre in nature, as the very thing that makes him the ideal candidate for action, the hero. With so much trauma occurring around him, one would like to believe that there is something more to the story. It is true that women are often the gatekeepers of the patriarchy, and it is an essential nuance to confront and explore. Nonetheless, what we see here is the rational female world holding Bill back from his destiny as saviour. His daughters, his wife, the pub owner, the nuns: they are all forces demanding inaction. But the ephemeral memory of his mother and the shaking convent girl he connects with (who has few lines, almost none of them coherent) push him forward instead, towards action. I have not read the novel, which is widely acclaimed and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, but I would like to believe that what we are witnessing here is a hiccup in adaptation. Perhaps Keegan’s story was stripped from its nuances as it was handed over to a male writer, a male editor, a male cinematographer, a male director. Perhaps this gap is what we are witnessing, a frustration which feels inescapable as the film progresses.
It is not that the film is bad, or that it is dangerous, or that men don’t have a voice in this story. It is just that we have seen this film before. So much here works, and the story is important and perhaps unknown to general, international audiences. It begs the question: is this the best that we can do? It is not the film’s fault that it came out days before women’s rights in the United States were crushingly called into question, and it is not the film’s fault that women around the world will walk into the cinema with this sour taste in their mouth. But it is the film’s fault that it took these women’s stories, their pain and trauma and torture, and instead left us with the vague memory of Cillian Murphy’s blue, sorrowful eyes.
Edited by Emily Henman, Co-Film & TV Editor
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