‘Small Things Like These’ Review: Cillian Murphy Brings Quiet Intensity to a Mournful Irish Moral Drama
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic From “28 Days Later” through to his recent, Oscar-nominated turn in “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy has cultivated a reputation as a strong, silent type — all while resisting the inscrutability associated with that masculine cliché.
His beautiful, sharp-boned face twitches and tightens and teems with feeling. Closeups always catch it thinking, wrestling with surges of vulnerability or violence, or watching other characters in turn.
It’s always busy, never blank. A story of the unspeakable gradually leaving the realm of the unsaid, “Small Things Like These” rests on both his quiet and his disquiet as an actor.
As a blue-collar family man growing increasingly alert to misdeeds in the sacred heart of his community, he’s not just the conscience of Belgian director Tim Mielants‘ delicate, understated film, but its live emotional current.
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