Small Things Like These ★★★

THERE’S one particular scene in the Irish drama Small Things Like These that lifts the film to greatness.

It involves three characters in a room having a cup of tea and cake in front of a welcoming fireplace.

What transpires is a seemingly polite and friendly exchange, but it masks a quiet tone of menace that is portrayed with a minimum of carefully chosen dialogue and masterful acting by Emily Watson and Cillian Murphy supported by youngster Zara Devlin.

This 2024 historical drama uses quiet under-statement to deliver a powerful look at one of the many travesties of Irish history, the impact on thousands of women and their infant children caused by the so-called Magdalene Asylums or Laundries that operated in England and Ireland for more than 200 years.

The facilities were run by the Catholic Church ostensibly to care for young ‘wayward’ women who were homeless, suffering mental illness or had been rejected by their families for a variety of reasons including having children out of wedlock.

But the young women were treated like slaves, forced to work long hours of hard labour, sometimes dying while forced to live there or having their children removed and sold.

In parts of Ireland the facilities lasted even up to the 1990s until the movement against them, including legal action, became too strong. But even today the Church resists taking responsibility for these actions , such is the widespread and deep influence of institutional Catholicism on Irish society and culture.

Rather than take a standard narrative approach or looking at the events from several angles – The Magdelene Sisters did this so well in 2002 – Small Things Like These sees power in focussing on one person’s dilemma of conscience.

Adapted from a 2021 novel by Claire Keegan, the location is the small town of New Ross in 1985 and the main character a coal business owner played by Murphy.

Bill Furlong is a decent, hard-working man from a working-class Catholic background who has five girls with his wife Eileen. It’s the lead-up to Christmas and money is tight.

One of the properties that Bill regularly delivers coal is the local convent which is one of the Magdelene Sisters’ facilities. Bill was brought up by a single mother and is wary around the Sisters.

On one occasion he is approached by a young woman working in the convent’s laundry who begs him for help. She is quickly dragged away and Bill chided for wandering into a private area.

Like everyone in the town, Bill either knows or suspects what goes on in the facility but turns a blind eye due to a combination of respect for the Church, the ideas that have been reinforced throughout their own upbringing and the economic influence of the convent that even extends to not accepting some girls into higher education.

Screenwriter Edna Walsh and Belgian director Tim Mielants strip the material back to its bare bones, focussing intently on Bill’s inner turmoil, brilliantly portrayed by Murphy with strong support from Eileen Walsh as his wife.

The film’s approach and themes are beautifully encapsulated by that scene in which Watson perfectly plays the Mother Superior quietly bullying and threatening the simple, tortured coal man.

Watched on Apple TV