‘Small Things Like These’ Review: Cillian Murphy Brings Quiet Intensity to a Mournful Irish Moral Drama
15.02.2024 - 20:09
/ variety.com
Guy 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.
For if Murphy’s character Bill Furlong is quiet, the town around him is practically petrified. A sleepy settlement in Ireland’s County Wexford, New Ross is, like the rest of the country, dourly in thrall to the Catholic Church, with local convent head Sister Mary (Emily Watson) held by all in tense, unquestioned esteem. The year is 1985, and a great institutional reckoning is some way off.
Still, people know enough to look tactfully away from the convent’s imposing, ever-closed doors when young girls in trouble are pushed through them. A single wall separates the building from the school attended by more fortunate children, Bill’s five daughters among them, and if any cries or screams are heard through the bricks, they’re quickly unheard by communal agreement. Deftly adapted by playwright Enda Walsh from Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted novella, “Small Things Like
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