Small Things Like These Review

Community can mean companionship but it can also mean complicity, especially in a small town where everyone knows each other and doesn’t really envision life beyond it. Your barber will always be your barber, the daily pub reset after work in a who’s who in familiar faces and the family who you go back to; the people who are worth all the monotony. So when we’re faced with adversity and a feeling where we know something is wrong, we can be at a crossroads with our moral selves and the self we present to the community, this is the conflict that reigns supreme in Small Things Like These.

Set in 1980s Ireland, we follow Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a humble coal merchant in the town of New Ross, his daily routine as he shovels coal, drives along the long stretching roads of his country to drop it off at the local convent. He goes to the pub and then goes home to his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh). As he goes about his days, he feels an immense amount of emptiness and unfulfillment with his life even through the love he has for his family but when some possible wrongdoing seems to be going on at the convent, (which is also a training school for girls ran by “Sister Mary” played by Emily Watson) it calls into question Bill’s morality, his past and the dark secrets of the town he lives in.

From the start, the film defines itself pretty quickly with long takes, a beefed-up sound design of Bill’s boots crunching on the ground, close-ups on Cillian Murphy, and not much in the way of expository dialogue. This is a film that is going to take its time, be subtle, and expect its audience to pay full attention to grasp its plot and themes taking the film in this direction allows us to gain a deeper relationship with its characters and environment allowing the film’s twists and turns to have an impact. While progressing in a style like this, it’s important to have actors who can communicate their feelings to the audience in a less overt way and the beading eyes of Cillian Murphy do not disappoint, reigning it in from his Best Actor winning performance in last year’s Oppenheimer; he plays a man full of indecision, inaction and fear in a film which can seem uneventful on the surface but his performance unlocks a complexity of emotions. Emily Watson as the sinister Sister Mary stuns too, with a subdued performance as she gaslights as a patron of spirituality but her sinister intentions aren’t too hard for any viewer to see. Although Small Things Like These is firmly in the category of character-based drama, the scenes with Watson and in the convent allow the film to build this creepy, horror-like tension which doesn’t derail too much from its style as the slow ambivalence of most scenes turns into slow threat.

Where the film falters is in some pacing areas, where it is respectable to see a film so confidently entrenched in a slow pace, more than a few scenes feel a bit too elongated and obscured which can be a problem when it easily sinks into the film’s feeling and miss out on important plot information and context. All in all, Small Things Like These is a plucky little dramatic thriller that feels nihilistic in its depiction of a small town’s religious institution, a centre for community that can lead to complicity in abuse but by its end, it reveals itself to have a huge heart and outlook to improve the world around us, even if it is small.