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‘Small Things Like These’ Review: Cillian Murphy Plays A Father In Torment In ’80s-Set Irish Trauma Tale – Berlin Film Festival Opening-Night Movie
‘Small Things Like These’ review: Cillian Murphy plays a father in torment in this ’80s-set Irish trauma tale premiering at the Berlin Film Festival.
Narrow, gray streets in the dim daylight of winter, peat hills between cramped villages, a crow sitting on a church spire: this is western Ireland in the ’80s, when the Celtic Tiger was yet to roar and jobs were scarce, divorce was illegal, condoms available only on prescription and central heating unknown. It is also the Ireland of the Magdalene laundries, businesses run jointly by Church and the Irish state where unwed mothers were consigned to repent of their sins, do hard labor for a living and ultimately deliver their babies for adoption. Keegan — whose writing is always a masterclass in tactful understatement, and inspired 2022 Oscar nominee The Quiet Girl — gives us the sense of a solid family man, well respected, kind to the urchin children of dissipated parents, outwardly content but nagged, as we all are, by the unspoken things in his past.
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