Small Things Like These review — trouble in the convent

Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy plays a man who witnesses Ireland’s now-notorious Magdalene Laundries in this quietly powerful adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella.

Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These. Picture: Lionsgate

Small Things Like These (M)

98 minutes
In cinemas

★★★½

“The nuns here have a finger in every pie. Do the sensible thing: look after your family and your business.”

That’s the advice Irish coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) receives from the woman who runs the local pub. His wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) agrees: “If you want to get on in this life there are things you have to ignore.”

This is the timeless challenge – to do what’s right at the risk of personal cost or to look away as so many others do – that Furlong faces in Small Things Like These, based on the superb 2021 novella by Irish writer Claire Keegan.

Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong and Zara Devlin as Sarah Redmond in Small Things Like These. Photo Credit: Enda Bowe

It’s approaching Christmas in the early 1980s. At the centre of the drama are Ireland’s now-notorious Magdalene Laundries: institutions run by the Catholic Church that take in unwed mothers. They have a roof over their heads but at a price.

In this case it’s the local convent, overseen by a formidable mother superior (Emily Watson). Furlong, raised a good Catholic boy, is edgy in her presence. Until, that is, he makes a delivery early one morning and sees something in the coal shed. “God help us,’’ he says.

He and his wife have three daughters and their educational prospects depend on staying on the good side of the mother superior.

“They’re not your girls,’’ his wife reminds him of the young women housed at the convent cum workhouse.

Furlong’s troubled childhood is central to his thinking. He does not know who his father is. He and his mother were helped by a well-off Protestant widow (Michelle Fairley) and her farmhand Ned (Mark McKenna).

Emily Watson in Small Things Like These. Picture: Lionsgate

This is a difficult book to film because it is so interior; the real action takes place in Furlong’s mind. The Irish playwright who wrote the script, Enda Walsh, the Belgian director, Tim Mielants, and the Oscar-winning star do a good job but the end result is not as complex or as beautiful as the book.

The title, so perfectly explained in the book, is only alluded to on screen.

The relationship between Furlong and his wife is less nuanced; less loving.

At times Murphy seems to be “acting” Furlong’s inner emotions and it doesn’t quite work.

Some of the best, and most heart-rending, moments come in flashback scenes with the young Bill Furlong (Louis Kirwan), a boy who wanted nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas.

Even so, this is a quietly powerful film.

If you see it and like it, I recommend you read the novella, and all of Keegan’s books. I think she is comparable, as a writer of the human mind, with her compatriot Colm Toibin.

Also in Review this week, Stephen Romei’s five star review of Oh, Canada.