Arts & Culture
Bystander Culture and ‘Small Things Like These’
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The first film from Big Things Films, Cillian Murphy’s production company, Small Things Like These is a beautiful adaptation of the 2021 Claire Keegan novel of the same name. Murphy’s performance brings a grounded, hopeful note to this melancholic exploration of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a coal merchant and father to five daughters. As Bill begins to uncover the sinister inner workings of the town’s convent, he struggles to grapple with his own past as the son of a young mother who very well could have ended up in a Magdalene asylum like it if not for the kindness of Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), who took them in.
For American audiences, this film may very well be their first introduction to Magdalene laundries. These institutions housed “fallen women,” like Bill’s unwed mother and the young girls he later discovers inside the convent, and sentenced them to long periods of intense labor under the strict supervision of nuns.