Small Things Like These review | A quietly brilliant Cillian Murphy powerhouse

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A coalman struggles to ignore the rotten heart of his idyllic community in a powerfully understated drama. Hereā€™s our Small Things Like These review.


Cillian Murphy might not be the first actor you’d think of to play a coalman. But then, Bill Furlong isn’t quite what you’d expect from a coalman, either.

Shy, awkward, and the master of a comfortable silence, he doesn’t even greet his family with a “hello” when he walks in the door; he simply cleans the coal dust from his face, sits down with his tea, and helps his four daughters with their geography homework. There’s a gentleness to him, a charitability that rears its head when he meets the son of a local alcoholic on the road home or puts money behind the bar for his employees’ Christmas drinks.

Still, when he sees a young woman dragged, screaming into the Catholic-run Magdeline Laundry – a workhouse-style institution designed to house “fallen women” since the 18th century – he doesn’t say anything. The place shares a wall with his elder daughters’ school, Emily Watson’s Mother superior reminds him. It would be a shame if they couldn’t find space for their sisters…

But when Bill returns to the convent at the crack of dawn and finds a woman locked in the coal shed, he struggles to get her plight out of his mind. Watching a group of schoolgirls laugh off the groping advances of their male classmates, his thoughts turn to his daughters and his own mother who, but for a quirk of fate, would have ended up in the same institution pushing pregnant women into the Irish winter.

Small Things Like These is not a showy film. Based on Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, Enda Walsh’s script has few of the hallmarks of your traditional conspiracy-uncovering true story. Bill – whose devout Christmas wish as a child was for a jigsaw puzzle – is as unlikely a protagonist as he is a coalman; you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a bit boring.

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But between Tim Mielants’ assured direction and a truly mesmeric performance from Murphy, he’s a character who holds our attention like a vice. For 98 minutes, the pair lock us into a small, simple world with an open secret burned into the rock. We never see the true extent of the institutional evil at play, but the sounds drifting through the convent’s bare halls are nightmarish enough, and the film is all the more powerful for it.

Small Things Like These is a quiet, unassuming study of our capacity to ignore injustice, and a man haunted by the misery outside his door. Cillian Murphy might not strike us immediately as a coalman; the film works because we have no problem believing he’s a good one.

Small Things Like These arrives in UK cinemas on 1st November.

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