Over two decades after his breakthrough role in the nerve-wracking zombie film 28 Days Later, Cillian Murphy is having the biggest year of his career thanks to Oppenheimer. In the mixture of biopic, thriller and war drama he embodies the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer Father of the atomic bomb. He is currently nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for his outstanding performance.
Now the world is looking forward to his next film: Small Things Like These. The opening film of the Berlinale 2024 takes you to Ireland in the 1980s and tells the story shocking history of the Magdalenenheime, in which young women were deprived of their freedom and harassed by nuns for decades. The abuses became known through the discovery of a mass grave in 1993.
Berlinale opening film 2024: Small Things Like These lives from its sadness and Cillian Murphy’s acting
Small Things Like These delves into one of the darkest chapters in Irish history. Correspondingly grim are the pictures in the Berlinale entry by Tim Mielants, who has made a name for himself primarily in the series sector. In the past, Mielants directed individual episodes of The Terror, Legion and Tales From the Loop. His first collaboration with Murphy: the gangster series Peaky Blinders.
In Small Things Like These he shows us the sleepy little town of Wexford just before Christmas. The streets are empty and the sky is gray. Small houses are lined up close together, but their fragile masonry offers little protection from the cold. Tired people with worn felt coats move slowly over the wet asphalt. A cheerless place, the epitome of poverty and hopelessness.
Nevertheless, every day Bill Furlong (Murphy) shoulders the heavy bags of coal that he delivers in his rusty truck in the area. Mielants is interested in every detail: Bill’s dirty hands, marked by the hard work. The sweat running down his forehead and the wrinkles of his face. And the glass eyeswhose gaze disappears into nowhere, as if it perhaps doesn’t even exist.
When Bill comes home, his wife and five children are waiting in a small space and writing Wish list for Santa Claus. He sits down at the kitchen table, listless and almost invisible, which, despite the desolation on display, speaks of pure life. Eileen (Eileen Walsh) gently touches his shoulder as she passes. This inconspicuous gesture from his wife is the foundation of the family.
Scarier than the atomic bomb: After Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy takes on an evil head nun
The moment is particularly wrenching when the freshly written wish lists end up directly in the fireplace after the children have gone to bed. Brutal, but understandable in its simple consequences. The Lights of the local Christmas tree are the greatest gift in the darkness. Otherwise… a new shirt? Or a book? David Copperfield maybe. Bill could read this over the holidays. A fantasy.
This year, however, the festival will not be all that contemplative. The screams of a young woman from her parents cause a stir is roughly taken to the nearby monastery. Bill stands in the shadow of the doorframe like a ghost, which leads to the shed where he delivers the coal for the nuns. The apathy with which he moves through his life cannot continue forever.
Mielants doesn’t spell out what happens behind the closed doors of the church institution. Through Bill’s perspective we get disturbing insights into the horror. But that’s what the director is more interested in Silence that falls over Wexford. For minutes he watches Murphy as he maneuvers his character through the dreariness without telling anyone what he experienced or what he saw.
Bill can no longer tolerate his own inaction, but also finds himself caught in a power dynamic in which he can barely afford to stand up for others, let alone himself. The influence of the nuns, especially Head Nurse Mary (outrageous: Emily Watson), goes too deep into the roots of the small town. Bill is shaking inside as if he would burst, but the exhaustion is too great even for that.
Small Things Like These lets us experience every inner tremble in Cillian Murphy’s acting
Few actors can perform as well on screen as Murphy, especially when the camera gets up close to us with close-ups every quivering pore on his face leads. Only in Oppenheimer did he impress as a tormented man who is confronted with the consequences of his actions and almost collapses under the cheers of the public after his weapon of mass destruction is successfully fired.
It is one of the most powerful scenes in Oppenheimer: in the roaring crowd, Murphy’s scientist sees only the suffering and death he has brought upon the world. But he is trapped, in the here and now, in his body. No breaking out. Just one Pulsating in panic. Bill in Small Things Like These is of course a completely different character, but here, too, Murphy’s acting sums up the struggle perfectly.
Although we initially only observe Bill through dirty windows, his restlessness eventually takes over the entire film. He would like to scream, but the strict world in which he moves doesn’t allow that. He can only escape into memory, where his own trauma awaits, although in this case Mielants definitely tells too much. The interwoven flashbacks are the weakest part of the film.
As long as Small Things Like These sticks to Murphy’s every emotion and movement, it is one of the stronger Berlinale opening films of recent years. Not a big, loud work à la Oppenheimer that dominates the discourse for months. More of a quiet, whispering rumination in which Murphy can be introspective drama can be expressed in devastating images.
Small Things Like These is in competition at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival. The film celebrated its world premiere at the Berlinale Palast on Thursday, February 15, 2024.