Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), the protagonist of Small Things Like These, sits in front of his window, a man living in 1980s Ireland, thinking of the 1950s, when he was a boy. His mother’s boss (Michelle Fairley) asks him, gently, why there’s spit on his coat. Those bittersweet memories bleed into his present daily life. He’s a man running a business delivering coal to several institutions in his town. One of those is a Magdalene convent. And during that time, most people in Ireland and worldwide thought positively of the laundries. That they helped girls and women with accidental pregnancies. His past already gives him a different perspective. One he confirms as his work gives him a closer look at the “laundry” and its Mother Superior (Emily Watson).

The film’s perspective is necessary in tackling a subject that has its unique level of exposure. I’ll return to gender dynamics later but it has its own approach to the way it portrays time. Opening scenes here look contemporaneous even if the events take place decades beforehand. No one dressed differently – the film eventually indicates its time period with needle drops. The same goes for the flashback scenes, as it makes the generation period differences subtle. The film’s juxtaposition of the bittersweet 1950s with the regressive 1980s shows that those time periods aren’t that far from us. Small Things Like These’s depiction of the Magdalene laundries serve as a warning of how bad things can be for girls and women as they were before. 

Small Things Like These has a man as a protagonist, working as the viewers’ stand-in. Through him we hear the girls crying out before it shows a mother handing her daughter to one of the nuns. They fall under the mercy, or lack thereof, of a woman. Yes, I do have issues with film and, presumably, its original story as it centres on a man. And yes, I may be white knighting a bit. At the same time, it’s commendable that men and women working in this film have a blunt message. They acknowledge that some women have a hand in upholding patriarchal institutions. The few interactions between Bill and the Mother Superior, at first, subverts the power dynamics between them. “Leave your coat off, you’ll feel the heat,” the Mother warns, feeling the need to establish dominance.

Small Things Like These‘s visual approach seems utilitarian at first but it deserves a more keen eye. The characters here are in slow yet constant movement which reflect, albeit a bit blatantly, the film’s thesis statement. A man runs playfully, being nice to little Bill, the boy he can’t formally declare as his son. A girl, Sarah Redmond (Zara Devlin) quickens her pace as she realises that grownup Bill can actually help her. Despite selling itself as a subtle film, it still exists to capture the performances of these actors. Murphy, receiving his Academy Award recently, proves that he can express the anguish of discovering a moral injustice. Alongside him is Watson’s bone chilling depiction of a woman establishing her twisted version of order through any means necessary.

Watch Small Things Like These in theatres across Canada.