‘Small Things Like These’ Review: Cillian Murphy Plays A Father In Torment In ’80s-Set Irish Trauma Tale – Berlin Film Festival Opening-Night Film
deadline.comRight from the start, there is no doubt where we are. Narrow, gray streets in the dim daylight of winter, peat hills between cramped villages, a crow sitting on a church spire: this is western Ireland in the ’80s, when the Celtic Tiger was yet to roar and jobs were scarce, divorce was illegal, condoms available only on prescription and central heating unknown.
It is also the Ireland of the Magdalene laundries, businesses run jointly by Church and the Irish state where unwed mothers were consigned to repent of their sins, do hard labor for a living and ultimately deliver their babies for adoption.
Academic research estimates that 35,000 women were forced into this service. Around 1,600 women and 6,000 babies are believed to have died behind the convents’ walls.
Nobody — apparently — asked why. The last of these institutions closed only in 1996. In the Berlin Film festival opener Small Things Like These, adapted by Irish playwright Enda Walsh and Belgian director Tim Mielants from Claire Keegan’s much-feted novella, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a coal merchant with five daughters and a small but thriving company that makes him an unspectacular but respectable living.
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