No one does crisis quite like Cillian Murphy. Maybe it’s the blue eyes, or the jawline that flares with tension so well. There are few actors working today who have demonstrated such range throughout their career while maintaining such consistent hallmarks in the kinds of roles played. From 28 Days Later to Peaky Blinders to Oppenheimer, Murphy has spent decades specializing in distress. Even in the romantic comedy Watching the Detectives, arguably the most lighthearted film of Murphy’s career to date, he spends much of the movie spiraling over Lucy Liu’s antics. Though there is no doubting his range as an actor, he just really doesn’t seem to be drawn to characters in silly, goofy moods.
As such, it’s hardly a surprise that Small Things Like These, which also marks Murphy’s official foray into producing through his new production company Big Things Films, co-founded with frequent collaborator Alan Moloney (Breakfast on Pluto, Perrier’s Bounty) is a character study of a man caught in a moral quandary.
The year is 1985, and it’s approaching Christmas in the Irish town of New Ross. The man in question is Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and father of five daughters with his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh). Doing his deliveries earlier than usual one morning, Bill sees something he shouldn’t at the local convent; namely, a young woman named Sarah (Zara Devlin) locked in the freezing cold coal shed. Everyone knows that the convent houses what is known as a “Magdalene laundry”—effectively, a penitentiary workhouse for unwed mothers or otherwise “fallen” women.
Likewise, most everyone knows, on some level, bad things happen there—but everyone is far too concerned about bringing down the wrath of the all-powerful Catholic church, personified by the convent’s Mother Superior, Sister Mary (a soft-spoken but convincingly intimidating Emily Watson) to say anything about it. But Bill, for reasons the film explores through a series of flashbacks to his childhood, faces increasing internal conflict regarding the situation and his own complicity, even as his wife and others around him encourage him to keep his head down.
Murphy has long been the type of actor to balance big-budget popcorn fare with small indie projects that hit closer to home, and Small Things Like These is certainly of the later category. It’s a who’s who of Murphy’s nearest and dearest collaborators, from director Tim Mielants (several episodes of Peaky Blinders) to co-star Eileen Walsh and writer Enda Walsh (no relation)—i.e., Murphy’s creative collaborators on Disco Pigs, the two-hander stage play (and later film) that launched the actor’s career. Nowadays it seems everyone wants to be a producer (at least on paper), but the strength of the creative and thematic throughlines across Murphy’s filmography as an actor suggest he actually has something unique to bring to the table in donning the producer cap.
A quiet, intimate character study—Bill is a man of few words, and the film features remarkably little scoring—Small Things Like These is about as honest and accurately titled a film as there ever was. Because this film is absolutely small, but not in a bad way. Mielants’ subtle but thoughtful direction avoids all the most common pitfalls of such intimate character studies, crafting an excellent showcase for Murphy’s remarkable skill as an actor without forgetting to use visual storytelling and other such cinematic tools to aid in exploring Bill’s largely internal crisis. While a deeply personal and authentic portrayal of Ireland’s past, there’s a compelling relevance to the story in the present moment nonetheless: a nuanced and unvarnished portrait of an everyday man trying to be a good person in a world where standing up for what’s right can have potentially profound consequences.
Small Things Like These is now playing in theaters.