Cillian Murphy, fresh from his Oscar triumph in “Oppenheimer”, adds another “startling performance to his résumé” in this “stylish” drama adapted from Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella, said Kevin Maher in The Times.
“The setting is the God-fearing town of Wexford, Ireland, in the mid-1980s, and yet there’s nothing quirky, green or ‘Oirish’ about it. This, instead, is a frozen grey winterscape of street shadows and perpetual darkness, with appropriate overtones of psychological horror.”
Our hero is Bill (Murphy), a kindly coal merchant who has been left exhausted by the physical demands of his job; he is “drifting from his quietly controlling wife” (Eileen Walsh), and finds that he can no longer turn a blind eye to what is occurring in the town’s Magdalene laundry.
Via glimpses and chance encounters, he is aware that “girls and so-called ‘fallen women'” are being worked, abused and starved to the point of delirium by “brutal, hard-eyed nuns” (including Emily Watson’s mother superior). In the end, the film it most reminded me of was “The Zone of Interest”, “because of the attention it focuses not on the torture site, but on the sickening collusion outside”.
Be warned: this is not a film that brims with “good cheer”, said Xan Brooks in The Observer. But told with perfect pacing, this Samaritan tale “casts a powerful spell”.
The “cinematography can err on the side of murk”, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times. But “in delicate movements, the miserabilism of ‘Small Things Like These’ coalesces” into a drama that is wonderfully cathartic, and that is well anchored by Murphy’s “fiercely internalised performance”.