Cillian Murphy is coming off the greatest moment in his acting career as he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor at this past March’s Oscar ceremony. His first film role post-winning the Oscar was going to be a highly anticipated movie. That movie is none other than Small Things Like These. A period piece set in the 1980s. The kind of film Murphy is at home in.

Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is the owner of a coal company.  He has men who work for him fill up bags and he takes his yellow work truck around New Ross, Wexford, a county of Ireland delivering his bags of coal to the locals so they can keep warm during the cold, wet, and dank nights. He also has a wife and four beautiful children he has to take care of. The problem is he has something missing in his heart. Sure he’s a good guy and father, but he’s missing something, he can’t figure it out. 

The main character played by Murphy is a bit melancholic. He sad and for most of the film viewers watching probably would have a hard time understanding why until you start hearing someone cry across the street from his workplace. It’s a convent that houses girls. The nuns there treat the girls badly and he tries to help one of them because of some past trauma he had when he was a child.

The flashbacks the director uses to connect the dark and cold scenes set in the 80s are a contrast to the 60s when the main character grew up.  Even though the 60s scenes looked nice they had some tragedy in them. That’s why they are a good dichotomy to the 80s scenes. This place where the nuns are abusing children is as miserable a place as I could imagine. And I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts where I thought it was hell on earth. That’s how much I hated living there. This was just as bad if not worse. The filmmaker Tim Mielants captured the miserable nature of this perfectly well. 

Part of what makes this story based on the novel by Claire Keegan and adapted by Enda Walsh was the fact that the story took place in Winter and Christmas played a factor in the events. Christmas is a time of family and giving, but it represents a bad time for these children who are abused at the hands of these nuns and younger Bill who faced a tragedy at a young age at this time in his life. Things got worse after that for him until they eventually got better in the form of his wife and family as well as his successful business. 

Emily Watson plays the main nun Sister Mary. She doesn’t seem all that bad until she does something that proves she’s the bad guy or girl of the story. A lot of villains don’t think they’re the villains of their own story. History proves that in the long run. These nuns, young or old, weren’t that nice. I’ve been around a few nuns in my day and they didn’t seem that bad but this was a different day and age. I have felt abuse before so I knew what that had to be like for the main girl in the film.

Small Things Like These isn’t going to be a movie for everybody. It’s a sad, depressing film until the end. It will remind you of bad times in your life, most likely. It did for me. The place the movie took place in seemed miserable and the nuns were nasty as well. The only good-hearted nice person as his wife says is Murphy’s character. In the end, he does what any good person would do. That’s the motive of the story. Do the right thing when you’re called to do it. It wasn’t easy but Murphy’s character did it. The look and feel of the film took me back to my own childhood which I’m not proud of because of what happened to me. I like this man featured in the film who became a better person.  I got something out of this movie, I don’t know if others will though.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen