This historical drama focuses on the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, where physical abuse was rampant, and young Irish girls working in the Laundries were abused.
SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE. Starring: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Clare Dunne, Helen Behan, Zarah Devlin and Emily Watson. Directed by Tim Mielants. Rated M (Mature themes). 98 min.
Review by Peter W Sheehan Jesuit Media Australia
The film was adapted by Edna Walsh from a 2021 novel written by Irish novelist, Claire Keegan, and is an international co-production between Ireland and Belgium. At the 21st Irish and Television Awards in 2025, the film won awards for Best Film, Best Script, and Best lead Actor (for Cillian Murphy), and Emily Watson was awarded Best Supporting Performance at the Berlin International film Festival in 2024
In the Christmas season of 1985, after dropping off a load of coal to the local Catholic nuns running a charitable institution called the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, a county Wexford coal man, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) from the Irish town of New Ross, finds a girl, Sarah (Zarah Devlin) who is terrified after being locked all night in the freezing coal shed of the local convent. Sarah pleads with Furlong to help her. Bill’s own mother was pregnant with him as a teenager, and she was taken in by a local family as a house-keeper, that saved her from the infamous Magdalene Laundries run by the nuns. Furlong is haunted by the girl and her similarities with his own past. His wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh) knows and accepts that something cruel is going on at the convent – the laundries were detention homes from which young children were shipped out for adoption for religious gain to the order, and the maltreated children of the laundries were engaged in forced labour.
Sarah was also the name of Bill’s mother, and the interaction leads Furlong to discover disturbing secrets hidden by the local convent, that lead him to confront shocking truths of his own. In the film, the mother superior of the Magdalene Laundries is played by Emily Watson who was awarded for her role as the forbidding Sister Mary in charge. The last of the laundries was closed in 1996. The novel and the film that is based upon it are both drawn from fact. The Irish Government issued a formal apology in 2013 for the abuses that occurred, and set up a fund for the victims.
Cillian Murphy delivers an outstanding performance as Bill Furlong, whose childhood was severely affected as the illegitimate son of a housemaid, and he is unnerved by the suicidal state of the pregnant girls living at the convent and is conscience-stricken. With five daughters of his own, he is in living agony, and can’t cope with Sister Mary’s totally untrustworthy behaviour as the person who is now in total control of his daughter’s education. Cillian Murphy’s acting is fiercely understated and compelling, and very powerfully communicates the major emotional truths that permeate the film.
This is a tightly controlled film dedicated to the female victims of the Magdalene Laundries, and is suffused with sadness in the injustice and inhumanity of what occurred.
Peter W Sheehan is an Associate of Jesuit Media