Small Things Like These is a historical drama that focuses on the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, where physical abuse was rampant, and young Irish girls working in the laundries were abused. Source: Australian Catholics.
The film was adapted by Edna Walsh from a 2021 novel written by Irish novelist, Claire Keegan, and is an international co-production between Ireland and Belgium.
In the Christmas season of 1985, after dropping off a load of coal to the local Catholic nuns running a charitable institution called the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, a county Wexford coal man, Bill Furlong (Murphy) from the Irish town of New Ross, finds a girl, Sarah (Devlin) who is terrified after being locked all night in the freezing coal shed of the local convent.
Sarah pleads with Furlong to help her. Bill’s own mother was pregnant with him as a teenager, and she was taken in by a local family as a housekeeper, that saved her from the infamous Magdalene laundries run by the nuns.
Furlong is haunted by the girl and her similarities with his own past. His wife, Eileen (Walsh) knows and accepts that something cruel is going on at the convent – the laundries were detention homes from which young children were shipped out for adoption for religious gain to the order, and the maltreated children of the laundries were engaged in forced labour.
Murphy’s acting is fiercely understated and compelling, and very powerfully communicates the major emotional truths that permeate the film.
This is a tightly controlled film dedicated to the female victims of the Magdalene laundries, the last of which closed in 1996, and is suffused with sadness at the injustice and inhumanity of what occurred.
Review by Peter W Sheehan, Jesuit Media
Small Things Like These: Starring Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Abby Fitz, Michelle Fairley, Clare Dunne, Helen Behan, Zarah Devlin and Emily Watson. Directed by Tim Mielants. Rated M (Mature themes). 98 min.
FULL REVIEW
Small Things Like These (Australian Catholics)
