Claire Keegan

Small Things Like These

03/11/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Some films are like icebergs. There’s a lot more going on beneath the surface than we are actually shown onscreen. Small Things Like These, directed by Tim Mielants and adapted by Enda Walsh from the novella by Claire Keegan, is a good case in point.

Set in a small town in Ireland some time in the early 1980s, it’s the story of Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a mild-mannered coal man, who spends most of his time distributing sacks of fuel to the local community. He rises in the small hours every morning and plies his trade through all weathers. Every night he comes home to his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), and his five daughters, living cheek by jowl in their little house. His first task is always to scrub his dirt-encrusted hands clean. But some things are not so easily erased.

One of his regular delivery slots is to the local convent and, when visiting the place, he cannot help but notice the seemingly endless ranks of teenage girls, pressed into service in the laundry and the kitchen, working like slaves for the nuns, under the steely command of Sister Mary (Emily Watson). When he finds one of the girls, Sarah (Zara Devlin), who is pregnant and being made to sleep in the coal shed as a punishment, the incident kindles a series of powerful memories from his childhood, when young Bill (Louis Kirwan) and his unmarried mother – also called Sarah (Agnes O’Casey) – were taken into the home of a kindly local woman, Mrs Wilson (Michelle Fairley).

In terms of plot, there isn’t much more to be said but what there is – in abundance – is a sense of steadily mounting pressure as older Bill, a man who finds is hard to be confrontational, who can barely muster half a dozen words in any given conversation, gradually arrives at the realisation that he has to do something about a situation that will allow him no rest.

Murphy manages to evoke so much with just smouldering expressions and the occasional panic attack, while Watson submits a powerful cameo as Sister Mary: cold, supercilious, calculating, willing to bribe Bill with cash to procure his silence about some of the things he’s witnessed. Meanwhile, everyone else in the community is urging him not to make waves, pointing out that the nuns have the power to make things really difficult for him and his family.

And Christmas is coming… why rock the boat?

As somebody who was raised as a Catholic, I identify with much of what I see here – and as the film builds to its powerful conclusion, I find my anger rising along with it. Small Things Like These won’t be for everyone – so much of the story is left for the viewer to mull over and conjecture about – but for my money it’s a little gem, a film that pins down the dark iniquities that are all too often committed in the name of religion. It’s possibly the bleakest ‘Christmas’ movie ever.

The film is dedicated to all the women who suffered in the ‘Magdalene laundries’ of Ireland before they were finally done away with in the – believe it or not – late 1990s.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin)

18/02/23

Amazon Prime

Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin), based on a short story by Claire Keegan, is a beautiful film, as intense as it is languorous. It’s a simple story, elegantly told. The titular girl is Cáit (Catherine Clinch), and she’s quiet in many ways: tongue-tied, illiterate, watchful, an outsider. When we first see her, she’s hiding – in a field and then under her bed. She seems choked with secrets and longing, simultaneously yearning to be seen and to disappear.

Her home life is one of poverty and neglect. The house is full of children, and there’s another on the way. Her Mam (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) is exhausted; her Da (Michael Patric) is a wastrel, gambling their meagre income and failing to do any work. He spends his time, predictably, with other women or in the pub, and Cáit’s mistrust of him is palpable. Is he abusive in other ways?

The kids at school call Cáit a weirdo, so it’s no surprise she wants to run away. And it’s no surprise to us that Mam can’t cope, and packs her off to spend the summer with some distant relatives – although it’s certainly a shock to Cáit, who isn’t told anything about where she’s going, before being bundled into Da’s car.

But her banishment proves her salvation, and – under Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett)’s gentle care and tutelage – Cáit blossoms. The healing is a two-way process: these stand-in grandparents have their own sorrow, evident in the carefully preserved child’s bedroom Cáit sleeps in, with its train wallpaper and wardrobe full of ‘just the right size’ clothes. Bairéad captures the sense of endlessness that comes with the long school holidays, while cinematographer Kate McCullough bathes the Irish countryside in a golden glow, making this month of respite seem like a whole new life.

There’s a raft of narratives out there that plumb the same notion: a single summer that shapes a person’s life – Willy Russell’s One Summer, Noel Streatfeild’s The Growing Summer, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, to name but a few (in fact, Heidi features as a bedtime story here, although – of course – her tale is the reverse of Cáit’s). But this Irish-language film stands out, perhaps because of Clinch’s heartbreaking performance – you can almost feel her aching with loneliness and love. Despite the overt simplicity of the tale, there’s a lot to uncover.

With an Oscar nomination for best international feature, The Quiet Girl seems destined to make a lot of noise.

4.7 stars

Susan Singfield