Our perspective is largely restricted to Bill, who lives with his wife and daughters in 1980s Ireland, and who has a business delivering coal. One day, while dropping off an order at a local convent, he sees a young woman being forced inside, screaming. He doesn’t do anything but watch, and maybe he can’t do anything more than that, but it makes him think.
If you have even some idea of Irish history, you might have a suspicion about what’s going on, but one of the magnificent aspects of the new movie Small Things Like These is that it doesn’t feed us information, we have to piece it together ourselves. The movie’s based on the highly acclaimed novel by Claire Keegan, and keeping our view and our knowledge restricted to what Bill knows and sees and remembers forces us to understand things as he might understand them, and to see his internal journey as he decides what, if anything, he’s going to do.
Bill is played by Cillian Murphy, who’s the best I’ve ever seen him. It’s a remarkably physical performance, remarkable because of how subtle it is—his audible breathing and obviously pained body are exactly what you’d expect from someone who deals in coal every day, but none of this is ever showy or overly expressed. And we also see the pain in Bill’s face as he remembers a formative part of his life, but we begin to realize the pain is maybe less from what happened then, and more from what that means for him now.
The movie is shot gorgeously, but it’s also shot intelligently—director Tim Mielants sets up some shots early in the film that seem to draw a little more attention to themselves than we expect, but then repeats them later, or at least echoes them, in different contexts, showing us the attitudes of the townspeople and, in one case, the warmth of human kindness. It’s one part of an exceptionally made film, a film that only grows richer the longer you sit with it.
Small Things Like These is in theaters November 8th.
