‘Small Things Like These’ is, as the title suggests, something of a small-scale, even minimalist, viewing experience, but it is explosive in terms of the way it addresses underlying themes relating to abuse within the context of the Magdalene laundries. Although set in a small town in County Wexford in the first part of the 1980s – with ‘Come On Eileen’ playing in the pub one of the only things that dates this film – it could have been set at any time since the Laundries were established in 1922.

Cillian Murphy puts in an extremely introspective, unflashy performance as Bill Furlong, a local man whose job entails delivering coal in his pickup truck, and one day, when he sets foot in the Good Shepherd Convent, a teenager runs up to him and asks him for his help in getting her out of there. Reminiscent of Iris’ imploring to Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, Bill is haunted by what he has heard and cannot get the cry for help out of his head. When he starts making enquiries, the Mother Superior, played as an ogre and manipulative figure by Emily Watson, warns him off, insinuating that if he isn’t careful his five daughters won’t get the excellent and difficult to come by education that the nuns provide in the local community.

This precipitates considerable soul-searching on the part of Bill, whose mother was herself unwed and was lucky to avoid the laundries herself. The ending of the film is an intriguing one as it is so optimistic that one wonders if it is playing out in Bill’s imagination (the same could be said about the ending of ‘Taxi Driver’). And the implications of it being true would come at a price, as in defying the Church Bill would likely find himself ostracized from the local community. There is a sharp Dickensian element, too, to ‘Small Things Like These’, and not just because the young Bill, whom we see in flashbacks, is reading ‘David Copperfield’.

Like Murphy’s Oscar-winning performance in ‘Oppenheimer’, Bill is here a man prone to introspection and who has a crisis of conscience, knowing that he has the power to make a decision whose impact on others is momentous, and more than one person can carry. But the film begs the question as to whether we turn a blind eye or fix a problem, irrespective of the consequences, and this is a sombre, painful film to watch. When the problem takes the form of institutionalized abuse, this is a thorny but timely drama which is based on real life tragedies.