Cillian Murphy follows Oppenheimer with Irish film Small Things Like These

Matt Damon was so impressed by the Irish actor while working together in the New Mexico desert he signed on to help produce Small Things Like These.

‘Quietly impressive’: Saoirse Ronan in the The Outrun.

Irish actor Cillian Murphy may have moved up in stardom rankings since he last presented a film in Berlin, but the star of Oppenheimer and current Oscar favourite says he is always happy to be there and admits this is his fifth time with a film at the Berlinale festival.

We met in 2005 for Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, when Murphy’s portrayal as a transgender woman was groundbreaking. He’d turned up for the interview bleary-eyed as he’d been out on the town with his mates, whereas now with his new Irish film, Small Things Like These, it was much more about business as he is a producer and was largely behind the film being made. He even enlisted his Oppenheimer co-star Matt Damon as a co-producer.

“I was out in the New Mexican desert with Cillian and I was sitting opposite him watching what he was doing in Oppenheimer,” Damon recalls in Berlin. “I called Ben (Affleck) and told him what I was witnessing and how incredible it was. A couple of days later Cillian said, ‘I have my next movie I want to do’ and I said we are starting a studio so we can do it.”

Murphy admits it was “very serendipitous, it happened very quickly but there was good karma”.

Directed by Tim Mielants who worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders, Small Things Like These follows Murphy’s coalman as he witnesses a young woman being forced into a convent in small-town 1980s Ireland.

The Magdalene laundries have been the subject of films before, but here the story of unwed mothers being institutionalised and having their babies taken away is told from a male point of view.

Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These.

Cineuropa notes that Murphy “dials it right down for a true minimalist performance … the camera spends much of its time staring into his face, drilling into those eyes, studying those worry lines.” In other words, he is magnificent.

There were no Australian films in Berlin after a bumper year last year when Rolf de Heer’s The Survival of Kindness and Ivan Sen’s Limbo both featured in the competition. Treasure, which screened out of competition this year, at least has an Australian connection as it is based on Australian writer Lily Brett’s often comedic 1999 novel Too Many Men, about the lasting impact of the Holocaust. Yet even with Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham as a father and daughter travelling back to Poland, Julia von Heinz’s adaptation and direction were somehow sleep-inducing.

Cuckoo, directed by another German, Tilman Singer, was more adventurous in exploring genre territory and Euphoria star Hunter Schafer was certainly up for the ride. She was covered in blood for a lot of the film, which is set in a Bavarian alpine resort where her character’s family is staying and a strange force is at work – thanks to a maniacal scientist played by Dan Stevens, whose Downton Abbey days clearly are long gone. Schafer got to do a lot of screaming.

“Filming movies is the only place you’re allowed to do that and it’s OK,” the 25-year-old enthuses. “I like screaming and I like making movies.” New Zealand-born Marton Csokas, who has worked extensively in Australia and frequently has appeared in genre movies, plays her father.

“Rather than a horror movie I think it’s more a psychological drama,” Csokas says. “Though we don’t really want to put labels on it.”

As usual, several Sundance hits screened in Berlin. Sebastian Stan may have top billing in A Different Man, where his character undergoes surgery to correct his facial disfigurement, but Adam Pearson, an actor with an actual disfigurement, steals the film. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg explained he was drawing on his own experience of having a cleft palate in a story that is full of surprises.

Saoirse Ronan was quietly impressive in The Outrun, though the biggest noise was made by last year’s jury president Kristen Stewart in the lesbian psychosexual shocker Love Lies Bleeding directed by Rose Glass, who had made the 2019 psychological horror film Saint Maud.

“I definitely did this movie for Rose as Saint Maud is one of my favourite films,” Stewart says. The story follows her gym manager Lou who falls for bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and ultimately goes to great lengths to keep her new love out of prison. Audiences erupted with laughter at the sight of a long-haired Ed Harris as Lou’s criminal father.

Next up, Netflix has two entries at the festival: the Italian series Supersex, which is based on the life of porn superstar Rocco Siffredi and streams from March 6; and Spaceman starring Adam Sandler, streaming from March 1. As for the competition films and potential winners, Germany has produced two of the favourites: From Hilde, With Love starring Liv Lisa Fries as an ill-fated World War II heroine; and Dying, a wonderfully wry family comedy-drama about ageing starring Lars Eidinger, who, like Fries, starred in the hit German series Babylon Berlin.

There’s no doubting that German cinema is on a roll – The Teachers’ Lounge, which premiered at last year’s Berlinale (and releases here April 25), is a finalist for best international feature at the Oscars, marking the second time in a row that a German film has been nominated. Last year All Quiet on the Western Front not only won the prize but also picked up three more statuettes for cinematography, original score and production design.

So it will be interesting to see how the two Berlin competition films fare in the festival awards on Saturday night.

The 74th Berlin International Film Festival in Berlin concludes on Sunday.