The words of Claire Keegan are brought to life visually by director Tim Mielant through the eyes of a subtle Cillian Murphy as Small Things Like These’s silence of complicity speaks volumes in an isolated community ruled by the church’s leadership. 

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, father of four and coal man, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), treks through the blistering cold to complete his routes in the small town. Up at dawn he was loading up the can with coal and unloading at the local farms and businesses seeking to keep warmth. The days end with him returning to his cozy warm-lit home scrubbing away the residue and enjoying his female-filled family around the table. Bill keeps to himself just doing the job and being mindful of people around him, a normal man on the inside and out sensed by following his everyday run-of-the-mill routine. Bill has some trauma haunting his seemingly normal life as a middle-aged man detached from most around him from the constant buzzing to blurry images as the camera keeps him in focus. His menial life becomes disrupted while delivering coal to a convent as he watches a young woman being dragged inside against her will which unravels years of unresolved grief and a confrontation with his town’s horrific secrets. 

Inside these convents run by nuns, young women are put to task to work in abusive conditions shunned from society. Claire Keegan’s novel moves the focus from the perspective of these young women to the bystanders around them who ignorantly turned a blind eye to the horrible treatment.  In this small town, Bill who is already aware of the rumblings of mistreatment from his mother’s own experience is awakened when directly coming into the pathway of these women’s suffering. He is shaken with guilt and grief as he watches those around him telling him it’s not his business. What is so beautiful about the way Tim Mielant adapts the novel is using imagery of living in this cold community offset by the joy of the holiday season where all are like sheep led by the church’s shepherds. 

The world of Bill is female-dominated with these women tasked to uphold the patriarchal society of the town that negatively impacts them. Most of the women agree with Bill’s wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) on avoiding the convent’s dark truths. Most of his interactions occur with other women sending warnings as he gets closer and closer to interfering with something that is not up to them but how the system was built. Even though it is a small town the stakes are daunting for Bill as the camera frames a claustrophobic tight-knit town with nowhere to run. Everyone knows one another and their business so why doesn’t the business of the “fallen women” deem any importance as the daily happenings around? Stories hide amongst the city’s damp streets and looming Churches holding a sinful past, present, and future.

The streets are small as the main attraction for all social activities for New Ross. Pubs, caroling, shopping, it is all conveniently located where one can’t escape the mumblings of fellow townspeople. Bill’s daze is further emphasized in these locations with beautiful shots from above of a crowd singing Christmas hymns while he looks away opposite to the status quo. The Church has an overarching presence everywhere you turn, determining so much of the state of life in this town including the school Bill’s daughters attend. It sets up the risk of Bill speaking out and becoming even more alienated than he feels emotionally from his fellow people. His family wouldn’t be able to operate as they do with the plague of their father’s faults marking them wherever they go. 

Mielants builds tension around this story through brilliant visual cues that evoke a sense of fear signaling that something is not right even in the holiest of institutions. Specifically how he shows the Church with spoken language of prosperity and righteousness but in a cold sterile setting of emptiness once the mask of their involvement drops. We see the world through the eyes of Bill who warped everything he once knew as okay, placing the same sight of vision onto the audience to walk through this town knowing the worst of the worst. 

Murphy, who is fresh off an Oscar win, gives an even better performance as Bill—embodying this man’s years of unresolved grief as he’s checked out of life moving through day in and day out. Knowing the motions to seem fine to those around him but plagued by a past he isn’t sure how to speak on. It is when he discovers that young girl locked in the coal shed he begins to feel a way to do what he wasn’t able to do with his mother: save her. Though his fast choice won’t fix the broken system in him it’s not about what comes next it’s about what he did at the moment to extend that helping hand and fully cycle through his childhood terrors into adulthood bringing them back to his last moments before his mom was taken from him. It’s all through those icy eyes that say so much he isn’t able to communicate because he doesn’t know how, no one has ever talked about this or explained to him what it is. He drifts through life taking in his surroundings as a haze. 

The scenes of Furlong sitting around the tables with his four daughters as his wife tells him they should not get involved pose future questions of what happens if one of his daughters becomes the “fallen woman” they are taught to ignore. Would that change their outlook on their understanding of these women or cause a more compassionate interaction with the Church’s wrongdoings? It’s the logic of not caring until it personally impacts you that clouds so much judgment for these evils in the world and the simple case of these women could be used as a lens in so much of the world who also engage in these behaviors. Small Things Like These is specifically Irish but is also a message to the entire world as a universal story of power and abuse. 

Small Things Like These is one of the most important films of the year not only for women but for society to hold up a mirror on its complicity and guilt, as Murphy mentioned in an interview it is the art that is able to let us connect with our traumas as a people to process it and that is exactly what he pulls off here. 

Grade: A

Oscars Prospects:
Likely: None
Should be Considered: Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Emily Watson)

Release Date: November 8, 2024
Where to Watch: In Select Theaters