Cillian Murphy's Overlooked 2024 Drama With A 94% Rotten Tomatoes Score Is A Must-watch

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Many of Cillian Murphy's best characters are either American, like J. Robert Oppenheimer or Jonathan Crane, or British, like Jim from "28 Weeks Later" or the immortal (?) Thomas Shelby from "Peaky Blinders." But as Murphy himself will remind you, he's Irish, and one of his most recent films tackles a dark part of his country's history. 

That would be 2024's "Small Things Like These" by "Peaky Blinders" Season 3 director Tim Mielants, adapted from author Claire Keegan's 2021 novella. The movie received strong reviews and more than made its modest $3 million budget back with a $15 million gross in theaters, but it's still under-discussed. Sadly, that makes sense, as it's a quiet character study not really designed for a wide audience.

Murphy (who produced the film) plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in the Irish town New Ross during the 1980s. He's a moderately successful man, with his own business plus a wife and five daughters. But he remains troubled by his childhood, having been born out of wedlock and never known his father. If not for the kindness of his mother's employer, the widowed Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), who sheltered Bill and his mother, Sarah (Agnes O'Casey), like her own family, Bill would've likely been put up for adoption and Sarah sentenced to a Magdalene Laundry. What's that?

Until 1996, the Catholic Church in Ireland operated "Magdalene Asylums" for "fallen women" (unmarried women caught having sex or becoming pregnant, even if through sexual assault). These women were put to work to cleanse their supposed sins and basically enslaved. One of these laundries exists in Bill's own town, where everyone keeps their head down and doesn't peek too closely. But Bill, knowing he only has the life he does because of charity, can't look the other way.

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Spoilers for "Small Things Like These" ahead.

In the opening shots of "Small Things Like These," church buildings loom over New Ross as their bells ring out. The Church's power is baked into the town and personified by the convent's Mother Superior (Emily Watson). Watson plays the soft-spoken nun as being so powerful that she doesn't have to be loud. Bill can't even meet her gaze as she makes subtle threats behind her niceties.

Bill's work in coal means that he comes home and cleans his hands every night, i.e. exactly the spiritually symbolic labor that the "fallen women" of the laundries are tasked to do. But a small kindness cleans Bill's hands: He saves an imprisoned girl locked in a shed, wrapping her in a coat and taking her to his home. Bill is particularly suited to break this social norm because of his background. The girl Bill saves, Sarah Redmond (Zara Devlin), literally has the same name as his late mother. As Bill walks with Sarah through New Ross, everyone around them looks on in shock and judgment. Yet, they're all out of focus, as if Bill is finally tuning them out.

"The fact was that he would pay for [taking Sarah], but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known happiness akin to this," reads one of the novel's closing lines. Speaking to GQ in 2024, Cillian Murphy even said Bill saving Sarah is "not a classically heroic act."

"Small Things Like These" came about in part due to Murphy's work on "Oppenheimer" and not just via his post-Oscar win clout. During that production, Murphy passed along the script to his co-star Matt Damon, who had recently founded the new studio Artists Equity with Ben Affleck.

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"[Artists Equity] really let us make the film we wanted to make, because they're filmmakers themselves and writers, and they really understand it," Cillian Murphy told GQ. Indeed, "Small Things Like These" is extremely faithful to its somber source book and trusts its audience to weather the slow pace with Murphy's quiet but steely performance as an anchor.

Actor Eileen Walsh plays Bill's wife, Eileen Furlong, who advises him: "If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore." Walsh's casting rings hard because she previously appeared in Peter Mullan's 2002 film "The Magdalene Sisters" as Crispina, a woman imprisoned in one of those laundries. One of the greatest Irish films of the 21st Century, "The Magdalene Sisters" brought new attention to the real-life atrocities of the Magdalene Laundries (and was unsurprisingly condemned by the Catholic Church).

That "national reckoning" continues to this day, Murphy told GQ. "There's government commissions and government reports and academic papers on all of these things that you can get your hands on, but the public doesn't really read them. They will consume books and films, and I think it's a gentler way to confront it," he added. After all, "Small Things Like These" has as realistic a happy ending as one could hope for in this story.

In December 2024, shortly after the movie's theatrical release, the "Small Things Like These" novel was selected by Oprah's Book Club. That publicity is another win for civil education about the real history the novel dramatizes, at least the "gentler way." The book is only about 120 pages, and like the movie, it's easy enough to absorb in a single sitting if you set your stomach right for the cruelty inside.