Small Things Like These
New Ross, 1985. Bill Furlong is a hard-working coal merchant, doing his best to support his family amid the challenging conditions of 1980s Ireland. In the lead-up to Christmas, Bill makes a morning delivery to the local convent. There, an encounter with one of the convent’s traumatised residents shakes him to his very core. It forces him to ask questions about the nuns’ conduct that nobody else dares say aloud.
Based on Claire Keegan’s novel, Small Things Like These explores one man’s efforts to confront the culture of silence and complicity in Catholic Ireland. Starring Cillian Murphy in his first leading role since his Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer, the film also features Emily Watson as the convent’s powerful Mother Superior.
Festivals:
Berlin Film Festival, 2024 (Opening Film)
Awards:
Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance (Emily Watson) - Berlin Film Festival, 2024
Kindly Supported by
‘Cillian Murphy has brought to the screen a piercingly painful and sad story with a very literary intensity’
★★★★ Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
‘This is a somber, unhurried drama that takes its cue from the seeming quietness of the title and is all the more intensely moving for it’
David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
‘It’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives ‘Small Things Like These’ its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power’
Guy Lodge, Variety