Have You Seen Small Things Like These 2024?

Small Things Like These is an intimate, layered character study set in Ireland, with a focus on what matters: Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a local coal supplier with five daughters with his wife. A few days before Christmas in 1985, while delivering coal to a convent, he comes across a horrifying sight: a young woman being dragged, screaming and kicking, into the church by her mother and several nuns. The film, based on the novel of the same name by Claire Keegan, never says so directly, but given the politics of the time and the country's widespread Catholic practice, it doesn't take much to guess that she is an unwed mother. The image haunts Bill, forcing him to confront difficult memories of his own childhood and the religious foundations of this close-knit community.

Tim Mielants' film is haunting and contemplative, its solemn rhythms making the first hour agonizing. Through effortless cutting, we flash back to a young Bill living with his single mother on his employer's farm, then to his present-day self as a slumped-shouldered manual laborer. Director and cameraman Frank van den Eeden's opaque compositions (we see Bill from afar, trapped in a door frame, through a fogged-up car window) tell us a lot about him: his silence, his loneliness, his peculiar sense of morality. Everyone knows about the crimes in the convent, but no one dares to rebel against the powerful sisters. When Bill tells his wife (Eileen Walsh) about it, she begs him to stop. But Bill can't help it, especially when he meets Sarah, one of the unwed mothers freezing in a coal shed just outside the church.

It's a promising premise, but the film loses momentum in the final 30 minutes. The film could have been 10 minutes longer, because unlike God's Creatures, a contemporary Irish story that similarly deals with church misogyny, the sisters here, especially Mother Sister (Emily Watson), are little more than flat, sinister characters. But the urban dynamics are told in a sharp visual language that provides sharp context and necessary depth. Murphy helps, too. Here he is a George Bailey figure whose generosity holds the threads of this web together. Murphy knows that the smallest of decisions can make a difference. Every deep breath he takes forms the basis of the film. Murphy takes the final note with childlike wonder, overwhelming the audience with kindness as they watch the flawless "Small Things Like These." Now you can also watch this movie on Afdah Movie