Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh made their professional acting debuts in 1996 as teenage tearaways in a production of Disco Pigs. ‘We felt we could do anything,’ said Walsh. ‘It was like being inside a firework.’ They have collaborated separately with the play’s author, Enda Walsh (no relation), over the years, Murphy most notably in a 2019 stage version of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Now Small Things Like These, adapted by Enda Walsh from Claire Keegan’s Booker Prize-shortlisted 2021 novel of the same name, reunites the trio, the two actors playing a stoical married couple. It’s a case of striking while the iron is hot. Murphy won an Oscar earlier this year for his performance in Oppenheimer; Keegan’s short story ‘Foster’ was the basis for the finest picture of 2022, Colm Bairéad’s Irish-language The Quiet Girl, itself nominated for an Oscar.

The story is set in 1985 in New Ross, County Wexford. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, is in a state of hushed trauma, which for the most part he conceals from his wife, Eileen, though not from the camera. There is an extraordinary moment when Bill is asked an innocent question by one of his daughters as he is toasting bread over the fire. He stops, ruminates, chokes slightly on his reply and seems about to crumple. It is Murphy’s most painful and mysterious piece of screen acting.

The question Bill struggles to answer is whether Santa brought him anything when he was a child. ‘He did,’ he says, gasping for breath. ‘Of course, yeah.’ Pause. ‘He… He…’ Almost as wounding as the memory this dredges up is his daughter’s reaction when he reveals that all he wanted was a jigsaw. Something in the way she scoffs at the modesty of the request calls to mind the schoolyard bullies who taunted him for being fatherless, streaking his coat with their spit.

Post-traumatic stress disorder had not entered the currency of conversation in 1985, but it must be close to what Bill is experiencing. The sound design suggests as much. Routine actions (a shovel digging coal, an axe splitting wood) are made startlingly loud. Senjan Jansen’s score builds on occasion into something like an aural panic attack. In one of the film’s key locations – a convent where unmarried teenage mothers are dumped, deprived of their babies, put to work and abused – a churning sound emanates from unseen corners, along with infant cries. Both Keegan’s book and Tim Mielants’s film are dedicated to those who suffered in Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. (Eileen Walsh played one such victim in Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters.)

In ‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’, a story published in her 1999 debut collection, Antarctica, Keegan refers to ‘everybody knowing things but pretending they don’t’. This is the atmosphere that pervades Small Things Like These. Bill begins to confront what is happening at the convent. In response, Sister Mary (Emily Watson) makes smiling, veiled threats and tries to buy his silence.

Viewers unfamiliar with the novel may experience a moment of plunging dread early on, when Bill offers a young boy a lift, which the child nervously declines. But there is no sinister motive here, merely a faltering desire on Bill’s part, unexpressed until the end of the film, to deliver salvation to the neglected waifs he encounters. Ultimately, it is his late mother, as well as his own childhood self (who is shown lying beside the adult Bill in bed in one scene), whom he is trying to save.

Bill is established as a kind of Santa Claus figure. He is first seen making a list – not to distinguish naughty from nice but to assign coal to customers. He delivers his goods in sacks, though in a small truck rather than a sleigh. His daughters write letters to Santa, and Bill himself receives an envelope at Christmas time – though in his case, it is a bribe from Sister Mary. 

The action is often seen through glass: at one point, the camera looks out onto Bill’s timber yard from inside his office; at another, it watches him through a grubby windscreen. Bill enters the kitchen where Eileen is making a Christmas cake after first glimpsing her through the window. The question is whether he can cross the divide between himself and the world beyond. 

Mielants is measured in his direction, and Murphy’s decades-long rapport  with Eileen Walsh is rich enough that one can easily forgive the occasional moment of overstatement: Emily Watson’s fireside Bond villain routine, say, or the moment when a pub door swings open just long enough for us to hear the Human League asking, all-too-pertinently, ‘Don’t you want me, baby? Don’t you want me, baby?’