Small Things Like These: Cillian Murphy mesmerises in his first post-Oppenheimer role

The Oscar winner brings a moving vulnerability and hypnotic grace to this adaptation of Claire Keegan’s short story

4/5
Small Things Like These is a tight-lipped Irish drama even more suffused with sadness than the log-line implies, and shouldered with hypnotic grace by a very special Cillian Murphy in his first post-Oppenheimer role.
The year is 1985, in a small County Wexford town bracing itself for Christmas, and all the extra expense thereby incurred. Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant with five daughters, all of whom he expects to attend St Margaret’s, the only good Catholic school in the area. Oppressively, it’s next door to a convent, which has long been repurposed into one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries, incarcerating pregnant girls from across the county, and deciding the fate of their babies.
The source is a slim, Booker-shortlisted novel by the reliably tremendous Claire Keegan, whose short story Foster was adapted into The Quiet Girl. Screenwriter Enda Walsh and Belgian director Tim Mielants have clung tight to Keegan’s structure and not been tempted to overegg things: it’s a tale that’s resonant for many thoughts that are unspoken, swirling inside Bill’s head.
In flashbacks, we discover that he was born out of wedlock and fostered by a wealthy benefactor (Michelle Fairley), who rescued him and his mother from the clutches of the church. The predicament, then, of a young woman called Sarah (Zara Devlin), whom he discovers trapped inside the convent’s coal shed, plays heavily on his psyche. Few actors are better qualified than Murphy, who has a bare minimum of dialogue, at transmitting the torments of a man’s soul with such moving vulnerability.
Bill’s wife (a sterling Eileen Walsh, extraordinary as one of the captives in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters) worries she’s losing him to a growing depression. It falls to Sister Mary, the chief nun played by a calculating Emily Watson, to try and bribe him out of this funk, forestalling any stray thoughts of Samaritanism, with a padded envelope and a fireside chat about his daughters’ future.
There are a few touches of excess – the candles overact in church, blazing demonically behind Watson as she leads a service. But the film majors in a stifled melancholy, in the sickly glow of sodium lamps on deserted streets, and the default drinking of the under-occupied.
There is absolutely none of The Quiet Girl’s sunny lyricism. Even the well-meaning are complicit here in turning a blind eye to the ruination of lives, under the pretext of their salvation. Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.
12A cert; 96 min. In cinemas from Nov 1