Small Things Like These – Cillian Murphy casts light onto the dark legacy of Irish mother and baby homes (cinemas from Friday 1 November)

Bill runs a local company delivering coal and peat briquettes to homes and businesses. The Good Shepherd Convent is a regular customer. Over successive visits he begins to witness things that alarm him, particularly around the treatment of a young girl Sarah (played by Zara Devlin). It provokes him to reflect on his own upbringing, bullied in school, and growing up with his mother’s surname. Putting two and two together, he is faced with opportunities to intervene.

Much of Small Things Like These plays out in the run up to Christmas 1985. (In case you forget, snow blows around in several scenes to remind you, it’s frosty presence also increasing the feeling of bleakness.) This is a time when the Catholic school children sing carols from a platform in the town square before Mother Superior (Emily Watson) hits the button to turn on the Christmas tree lights. Bill is both bribed and threatened. The folk in Wexford know all too well that the nuns can apply pressure through rumours never mind their control of the local school. So many people are seen to be complicit by their deliberate lack of curiosity: “… if you want to get on in this life, there are things you got to ignore”.

Cillian Murphy is wonderfully watchable playing Bill, a man of many thoughts and few words. At least a third of the film is spent watching him process life. The vigour with which he scrubs his fingers at the end of the day to remove the coal dust indicates his sense of wellbeing. The concern shown in his brow before stopping his lorry to chat to a young lad far from home collecting sticks along the road. Aside from the elephant in the room of how human beings in religious orders could misinterpret or ignore Jesus’ parable around “whatever you did for one of the least of these”, the pivotal questions of the film are whether a man steeped with compassion can intercede, and will it make any difference?

I walked into a screening of Small Things Like These wary of a film centred around a man but telling the story of mother and baby homes in Ireland. There is tremendous power in the words of mothers who were victims of the abuse scandal finally being heard, no longer silenced or shamed. Check out The Sunflower Project Exhibition in The Linen Hall’s vertical gallery from 4–29 November with art, poetry and personal items telling the story of people impacted by mother and baby institutions, coordinated by Sole Purpose Productions.

By the end of 98 minutes, the quality of the storytelling and the portrayal won me over. Murphy’s involvement will bring the scandal to a wider audience. Moreover, the story proffers a challenge to citizens in contemporary Ireland and beyond about whether when faced with evidence of wrongdoing they will speak out and intervene. Sinéad O’Shea’s documentary Pray For Our Sinners (available on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Sky streaming services) is an interesting companion piece, the real life story of two doctors who intervened to help young mothers.

Claire Keegan’s novel won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Enda Walsh’s screenplay stays true to her narrative, and Tim Mielants’ unrushed direction creates a spellbinding portrait. Crucial scenes set in a coal bunker create a visual metaphor for the dark acts of inhuman behaviour. The lives of tens of thousands of woman and children were affected by the Magdalene Laundries. This film only begins to scratch the surface of what had been happening for centuries.

Small Things Like These is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre as well as Omniplex and Movie House cinemas and Belfast Cineworld from Friday 1 November.

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