Small Things Like These
Updated: Feb 23, 2025
Chilling and haunting, Small Things Like These creeps into your soul as one-man battles with consequences what he has seen in an infrastructure of religious power towering over him and his community.
“To get on in this life, there are some things you have to ignore"
There are very few actors who can be so compelling to watch by using silence, and Cillian Murphy is one of those few. Murphy plays Billy, a soft-hearted father and breadwinner, quietly composed but observant to the hardship of others around him. After long days delivery coal to his community to survive the winter cold, Billy returns to his warm family but loses nights of sleep after thinking back to his own upbringing and the quiet privileged care he received as a child. These flashbacks reveal new revelations make him understand the dark reality that is inflicted on the less fortunate and particularly in the workings of one convent at the heart of his village.
On paper Small Things does not have an adventurous or lengthy narrative, but in the same way that a minimalist filmmaker like Kelly Reichardt uses its time, Tim Mielants slowly engrosses us into the banal burdens of Billy and his growing internal reckoning with what he discovers. Murphy is the subject with most of the frame taken up by his conflicted and contemplative presence, it's an overwhelming powerful struggle on display and Murphy has the perfect eyes to cast such conflict. If Billy speaks out, he will disturb a sleeping dragon that could wreak havoc on his life and the future of his daughters, but I he remains silent is he submitting to tolerate inhumane crimes happening before him. The film is not about shedding light on this horror but how a person themselves actively participates in societal web of abuse.
Set during the Christmas season there is clear symbolic relevance as a time to think about the less fortunate, it could play like am oversentimental note, but it naturally blends with dark side of spirituality and religion that is at play. It has the chilling festive dread of Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt (2012), with occasional ambience of The Zone of Interest (2023).
Its brooding watch but abnormally powerful, and it rests on presence of Cillian Murphy to carry the weight of responsibility and morality for his soul.
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