Small Things Like These Review: A Quiet Crisis of Conscience

Is Small Things Like These worth watching?

Yes. Small Things Like These is a quietly devastating drama about one man’s conscience, carried by one of Cillian Murphy’s most internal and affecting performances. Tim Mielants adapts Claire Keegan’s short novel with restraint, letting a small-town Christmas story expose the complicity that allowed Ireland’s Magdalene laundries to operate for so long. The reservation is that its hushed style, with so much left unsaid, can feel inert, and viewers who need dialogue and incident may struggle to connect.

What is Small Things Like These about?

Small Things Like These is set in a small Irish town in the weeks before Christmas, 1985. Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a coal merchant, a hard-working husband and father of five daughters, who makes deliveries all over town, including to the local convent run by the Catholic Church.

On one of those deliveries he sees something that disturbs him, and he cannot stop thinking about it. As he tries to understand what he has witnessed, memories of his own childhood surface, and he begins to realise how much the town depends on staying silent about what happens behind the convent walls. Eileen Walsh plays his wife, and Emily Watson plays the convent’s formidable Mother Superior.

Mielants directs from a screenplay by Enda Walsh. It is a Belgian-Irish co-production in English, and it runs 99 minutes.

Cillian Murphy’s performance in silence

Murphy dominates the film, often with very few words. Bill is a man of routine and decency who has never questioned the world around him, and Murphy shows his growing unease through posture, glances and his hands, blackened by coal and scrubbed clean each night. It is an extraordinarily internal performance: the drama happens almost entirely in his face.

Emily Watson is chilling as the Mother Superior. In one pivotal scene, she applies pressure with courtesy, hospitality and implied threat, and the power she wields, without ever raising her voice, is more frightening than open hostility. Her performance earned her the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance at the Berlin Film Festival. Eileen Walsh is quietly strong as Bill’s pragmatic wife, who understands better than he does what speaking out might cost.

Complicity as the real subject

The film’s great strength is its focus on the ordinary people who looked away. Rather than dramatising the abuses inside the laundries directly, Mielants shows how a whole community, shopkeepers, neighbours, family, knew or suspected and chose silence to protect themselves. The result is a powerful study of how institutional cruelty depends on everyday compliance.

The period atmosphere supports this. The town is dark, cold and damp, with streetlights, church bells and Christmas preparations that feel more oppressive than festive. The visual palette is muted and wintry, and the careful sound design, footsteps, coal, wind, reinforces the sense of a place where things are heard but not spoken.

Where restraint tips into stillness

The film’s quietness is also its limitation. With so little dialogue and so much of the drama internal, some stretches feel static, and the flashbacks to Bill’s childhood, while important, can slow the momentum. Viewers unfamiliar with the history of the Magdalene laundries may find that the film explains too little, and its brevity means some characters are only lightly sketched. It asks a great deal of patience in return for its power.

Who should watch Small Things Like These?

It is for viewers who appreciate quiet, character-driven drama, admirers of Cillian Murphy, readers of Keegan’s book and anyone interested in Irish history. At 99 minutes it is short, but it demands attention. The themes, including the abuse of young women and girls by religious institutions, are distressing, though very little is shown explicitly; it suits adults and older teenagers.

If it moves you, try:

• Steve, Mielants and Murphy’s next collaboration, another drama about a man struggling to do right inside a failing institution.
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a Romanian drama set in the late 1980s about women trapped by a repressive system.
• Rosetta, the Dardenne brothers’ intense, naturalistic study of a young woman struggling for dignity.

The verdict

Small Things Like These is a haunting, humane drama that shows how cruelty survives through the silence of good people. Its extreme restraint can feel static, but Cillian Murphy’s performance and the film’s moral seriousness make it deeply affecting.

Rating: 4/5