An understated and deeply impactful film about one of Ireland’s darkest moments, powered by Cillian Murphy and a standout performance by Emily Watson.
ADVERTISEMENTOpening films at the Berlinale aren’t always the strongest.
Frankly, they’re almost always terrible. It’s become an on-running gag at this point.
2019’s The Kindness of Strangers with Bill Nighy attempting a Russian accent; 2020’s blander than bland My Salinger Year; François Ozon’s dire Peter von Kant in 2022; Rebecca Miller’s laughably poor She Came To Me last year...
Remember any of these films?
Chances are, you don’t – and for good reason. The only memorable one in that list of recent calamities is Miller’s, as it features one the most unintentionally hilarious closing shots, consisting of the camera panning over a packed theatre audience and ending on a sobbing Anne Hathaway in religious habit.
The Berlinale doesn’t know how to pick opening films.
But this year, what a relief it is to say the festival has broken the curse by offering a Competition film as its opening gambit that is both impactful and memorable. And like Miller’s film, there are garbs here too. Except no one’s laughing.
Directed by Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants (Peaky Blinders, Patrick), Small Things Like These is sensitively adapted by playwright Enda Walsh (Hunger) from the novella of the same name by Claire Keegan, the contemporary Irish writer behind Colm Bairéad’s Oscar-nominated drama The Quiet Girl. Set in County Wexford in 1985 during the Christmas period, it is an intimate drama about a dark moment in history: the Magdalene Laundries. These were the institutions run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish state, where an estimated 30,000 Irish women were incarcerated between the 18th and 20th centuries. The film is appropriately dedicated to the estimated tens of thousands of women that were institutionalised between 1922 and 1996 - when the last of the laundries were closed.
Several films have dealt with this collective Irish trauma – most notable being Peter Mullan’s searing 2002 drama The Magdalene Sisters. Unlike Mullan’s film, however, Small Things Like These puts the focus on the community outside of the infamous workhouses, as opposed to plunging the viewer inside a brutal portrait of how thousands of “fallen women” were forcibly institutionalised and abused within these asylums.
By shifting the focus to the outside world, we meet William “Bill” Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a middle-aged father of five and coal merchant who becomes aware of the abuse happening in the local convent. He wakes up to the complicity of his community, which has allowed the abuse to continue, and this forces him to confront his own childhood trauma - as well as make a choice.
The tension at the heart of the film comes from whether or not Bill will act on his findings or if he’ll follow his wife (Eileen Walsh)’s advice that “If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.” Beyond this tension, what holds your attention is the manner in which an intimate story manages to grapple with huge themes like guilt, shame and complicity without toppling into histrionics. The film’s primary register is subtlety, and bar a few minor wobbles (chief amongst them being a brief third-act encounter in a bar that risks spelling things out too much), there are a lot of show-don’t-tell moments here that elevate the film and its emotional impact.
The performances throughout are uniformly strong, with Murphy displaying total command over his character’s repressed grief. His nuanced portrayal of trauma works wonders here; whether it’s his increasingly vigorous hand scrubbing ritual when he comes home from work, or his subtle lip wobble during a quietly devastating scene at the barber’s where a past childhood memory comes barrelling through to cripple (or unlock?) the present, you feel for this benevolent man going through a crisis of conscience. As Murphy described his character, he is “a Christian man trying to do a Christian act in a dysfunctional Christian society,” and he manages to elevate what could have been a standard everyman character.
The only scene he doesn’t completely own refers to this institutionalised dysfunction in human form.
The centrepiece in question sees Bill forced to sit across from the head of the laundry, Sister Mary (Emily Watson). Having found a young woman in distress while delivering coal to the convent, a show is put on for him. Far from a showdown with the final level boss, everything is implied through understatement in this scene to great effect, and at no point is the viewer spoon-fed the unspoken truth: genuine compassion is faced with staged benevolence, a façade that barely masks intimidation and ultimately, bribery. The scene not only reveals that the laundries were just one of the many mechanisms used by the Catholic Church and the Irish state to regulate “deviant behaviour,” but exposes the Church’s Mafia-like stranglehold on a community who have learned not to make a nuisance for fear they could lose the little they have.
Watson is note-perfect: her uncaricatured and uniquely menacing performance doesn’t last long, but its impact lingers. Never has someone felt so intimidating with a kind word or the offering of a cup of tea. As for her more public prestation later in the film, the line “The Lord is compassion and love” takes a sinister turn, as compassion is being quashed while simultaneously preached. At Christmas, no less.
Small Things Like These could have leaned further into the dreadful ills that went on inside the convents, but its restraint yields results. This culminates in a sensitively handled final beat which lets hope shine through, while leaving the door wide open for a far less “happy” ending. Bill makes a choice, and its up to the audience to figure out quite how this initially uplifting denouement will play out. Like Keegan’s novella, there is a delicate balance at play in Mielants’ powerful and laudably understated film, one that shows quite how narrow the partition between hope and ruin often is.
At least we don’t have to hope for a strong opening film at the Berlinale anymore. We just got one.
