Small Things Like These shines a poignant light on Ireland’s recent history, exploring collective guilt and moral courage through the eyes of a grieving father, offering a profound reflection on national trauma and the weight of silence.
Small Things Like These opened this year’s 74th Berlinale as the first of the Competition selection, adding to the wealth of brilliant Irish cinema that we’ve seen over the past few years (The Quiet Girl, Banshees of Inisherin, An Irish Goodbye…). Belgian director Tim Mielants and Irish writer Edna Walsh present the subdued, slow-paced, gritty story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, adapted from Claire Keegan’s sublime 2021, Orwell Prize winning novella.
Sticking close to the narrative of the book, Small Things Like These focuses on the subject of the Laundries, also known as the Magdalene Asylums, which – for anyone who doesn’t know – were horrific institutions run by the Catholic church in Ireland for over 200 years. They claimed to reform ‘fallen young women’ but in fact brutalised these girls spiritually, emotionally and physically. It took until 1993, when the unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries that the media began to uncover the story. In 2013, the Irish state accepted their guilt in the ‘enslavement’ of over 10,000 women. The case of the Laundries is such incredibly recent history – the last Laundry closed only in 1996 – that Ireland is, understandably, still processing this trauma and the questions around what the significance of this event is with regards to its religious, gender, and political identity.
Other films have focussed upon this subject, notably Peter Mullan’s 2002 documentary drama The Magdalene Sisters and Stephen Frear’s moving Philomena (2013). Unlike these films, Small Things Like These isn’t told from the perspective of the victims of the asylums, but rather, through the eyes of County Wexford coalman Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy). Furlong is a softly spoken, middle aged father struggling with depression, grief and existential anxiety and through his work as a coalman comes face to face with the injustice and violence occurring at the local convent. We move slowly, quietly through Furlong’s struggle with the question, What can I do about this?
Using Furlong as our central character, Keegan – and by extension, Mielants and Walsh – are able to probe into the theme of collective responsibility, guilt and trauma. What was the role of the rest of Ireland with regards to the Laundries? Those who weren’t directly impacted, those whose children weren’t sent to the institutions, but who stood by, aware to varying extents of the abuse happening in their communities? As Mielants comments, ‘Of course, everything revolves around the Catholic Church… It’s about moral courage when you live in an autocracy… I always ask myself the question, What would I do in those circumstances?’
Set in the 1980s, with very limited dialogue, the film’s emotional arc is carried through the power of the performances and the potency of the cinematography. Eileen Walsh, who also starred in Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, gives a truly fantastic performance as Furlong’s wife, Eileen. Attempting to raise their many daughters in a community where the only decent education is to be found within the convent, the Church is an ever present part of all their lives, and Eileen has no desire to explore further the questions of what happens in the Laundries. Rather, she accepts it as the way the world works, preferring to look the other way. Walsh commented during the film’s press conference that she found a particular resonance with the character of Eileen – she herself really grew up in this world, raised alongside many siblings in a house which looked exactly like the one we see in Small Things, and her father was also a coalman just like Bill Furlong.
The cast’s personal connection to the film was further raised by Murphy at the press conference: “It [The Magdalene Laundries] was a collective trauma, particularly for people of a certain age, and I think that we’re still processing that… I think that art can be a really useful balm for that wound. The book certainly was a huge seller in Ireland, it seems like everybody read it. I think the sort of irony of the book is it’s a Christian man trying to do a Christian act in a dysfunctional Christian society. It asks a lot of questions about complicity and silence and shame.” Murphy is all set for his Oscars appearance on the 10th March, and although he was undeniably brilliant in Oppenheimer, I felt that he brought an even more stellar performance to Small Things.
Through sensitive, poignant storytelling, Small Things Like These is able to capture an emotive, considered portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with what life has given him. Bringing a philosophical depth and emotional complexity to a subject of national trauma, Small Things Like These provokes important questions around shame, complicity and responsibility and is definitely worth a watch (and read!).
