Scott Renshaw’s review published on Letterboxd:
Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries”—the system of convents that turned unwed pregnant young women into de facto slave labor—have been the subject of several fiction and non-fiction films over the years, but this adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel approaches the subject from a fresh and uniquely heartbreaking angle. It’s the story of Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a family man running a fuel-coal delivery company in mid-1980s Ireland, one of whose clients is a local convent. There Bill encounters some of its young residents, and faces a crisis of conscience deciding how to respond to what he has seen. Director Tim Mielants and screenwriter Edna Walsh prove efficient at conveying the small-town atmosphere where ruffling the feathers of the Catholic Church could harm Bill’s livelihood, as well as showing the flashbacks to Bill’s own childhood with a single mother that shapes his response. And Murphy’s performance is a terrific display of internalized conflict, perhaps best in an awkward confrontation with the convent’s smug Mother Superior (Emily Watson). It’s much easier in text than on the screen to present a character study built around someone’s internal struggles, but Small Things Like These becomes a powerful example of how the most Christian thing one could do on a Christmas eve is consider giving shelter to a pregnant girl with nowhere else to go.
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