SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE 12a

Oakwood Cinema audiences may remember a film we showed a couple of years ago, the excellent The Quiet Girl, based on a Claire Keegan novel. Keegan’s Small Things Like These was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2022 and has now been made into a film, starring Cillian Murphy fresh from his Oppenheimer success and Oscar for best actor. He plays a father in a small town in Ireland in the 1980s who is aware of something untoward within the local Church laundry. This relates to Ireland’s notorious (real life) Magdalene Laundries, where unwed mothers were forced to work as ‘slave labour’ while their children were put up for adoption.

It’s a challenging theme, and director Tim Mielants creates a brooding and atmospheric film which confronts this hidden history. Emily Watson is chillingly excellent as the Church sister.

The Guardian gave Small Things Like These a four star rating and described it as a “subdued but absorbing and eventful film”, whilst Empire magazine wrote: “It’s a deliberate film that uses small moments to examine one of the great questions of our time: how good people let bad things happen, and how we might push back against the dark.”