Written by Dilan Fernando

One of the earliest shots in Small Things Like These (2024) is a raven looming over a stone cross with a steeple in the background. It's dusk, the brisk air makes everything in and surrounding the town shiver. These opening shots quickly establish the film's juxtaposition of the internal warmth within its characters, against a decrepit landscape with a harsh impudence. This is reminiscent of the opening title sequence to Quentin Tarantino's 2015 film The Hateful Eight as a crucifixion statue of Jesus is buried by a blizzard with Ennio Morricone's foreboding score emphasizing a sense of hopelessness. Small Things is set in 1985 during the holiday season, Christmas is in the air, those fortunate and unfortunate carry hope in their hearts as they watch it pass by.

Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlough, a calloused, coal-covered Catholic man weathered by life; who runs Furlough's Coal & Fuel with his family helping periodically. His daily routine is composed of delivering coal and firewood to the impoverished inhabitants of his small Irish town in an old yellow pickup (a visual representation of the flicker of hope Bill's presence provides). Bill's workday concludes with the ritual of removing his worn-tattered charcoal blended donkey jacket, opening a toiletry bag (containing a comb, hard-bristled brush and a bar of soap), filling the sink with water up to the brim, and washing his hands. This is similar to a priest's preparation before breaking the Eucharist (a symbol of unity). Religious iconography is scattered throughout the film to present the crisis of faith and struggle between good and evil, which are so close in the film they sometimes sit atop each other. Bill uses the brush with such intensity hoping to remove all feelings of anger stirred up by the nostalgia and trauma that plague his mind.

In an earlier flashback, Bill remembers his first real Christmas with a wealthy woman who took him and his mother in. When not receiving the Christmas present he wanted (a jigsaw puzzle) and instead being given a rubber hot water bottle, Bill runs outside in a huff and punches into an oil drum of ice water. The flashbacks of Bill’s childhood are seamlessly edited into his present day life as an adult, a perpetual unification of the two everytime he feels nostalgia or guilt. Bill’s form of penance for having these feelings is from the mutilation of his hands, his definition of flagellation. Bill gets his covered dinner plate from the stovetop and sits at the head of the table overlooking his five daughters doing their homework. Thus is Bill’s daily routine, an unbreakable and generational cycle that is reflective of many 20th-century working class Irish families.

*Small Things Like These* changes what a film about the holidays can be about, with its enriched portrayal of working-class Ireland and the pain that binds people together.

Writer Enda Walsh’s sparing use of dialogue helps to create an internal portrait similar to that of Robert Bresson’s characters, many of whom have souls like typhoons yet live in solitude, unintentionally uniting those around them. Small Things Like These shares many parallels between another descendent of a Bressonian film, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Bill Furlough in Small Things Like These are internally isolated, insomniacs, slowly consumed by the contempt they have for the uncontrollable corruption present in the environments they reside in. The opening credit sequence in Taxi Driver has Travis’ face awash with red dissolving in and out of images of the nightlife in New York’s urban jungle. Throughout Small Things there are moments where Bill’s face is bathed in orange or stares at fire. Each use of color represents both the brewing anger and dormant warmth within each character, which they internalize and suppress by immersing themselves in their work. Self-mutilation is an attempt at exorcising these emotions; Travis holds his fist over a flame, while Bill coarsely washes his hands. Each film is mostly if not entirely viewed from their perspectives. In Taxi Driver, Scorsese uses point-of-view (POV) shots and voice-over narration for the audience to see the world from inside Travis’ mind.

In Small Things Like These, director Tim Mielants composes shots beginning with the focal point and having Bill passively walk through them or view them with an omnipresent eye. An example is a shot after Bill’s daughters perform their Christmas recital in the town square. The daughters walk down a street window shopping as teenage boys follow behind catcalling, the frame widens to include Bill looking over at the scene. Bill and Travis each stumble into the lives of neglected urchins while working. In Taxi Driver it’s Jodie Foster’s character Iris who climbs into Travis’ yellow taxi. In Small Things it’s in a cold cellar when Bill is delivering an order of coal that he sees an expectant adolescent mother sleeping on a mound of briquettes. Both films have the protagonists reluctantly become guardian angels by contending against the overbearing and controlling powers. Travis fights Harvey Keitel’s Sport (Iris’ pimp) and Bill adopts a resident of the rehabilitation convent, disregarding the implicit warning of Emily Watson’s Sister Mary. The initial meetings of the lead characters (Travis and Bill) and the antagonists (Sport and Sister Mary) results in money being used as leverage.

Sport gives Travis a crumpled twenty dollar bill and Sister Mary gives Bill a Christmas card addressed to Mrs. Furlough containing a handful of quid. Cinematographers Michael Chapman and Frank van Den Eeden both create viscerally desolate hellscapes using incandescent lighting and shadows; Travis’ first time walking into Iris’ tenement and Bill’s first time walking into the missionary. Sport and Sister Mary present themselves as placable and caring (like the snake in the Garden of Eden). Sport has a red press-on nail on his pinky finger akin to a demon’s talon. In a scene later on in Small Things while reading a prayer during mass in a frigid church, notice Sister Mary’s breath, the kind words she speaks are contradictory to her fiery disciplinary hand. Finally, when Travis and Bill ask for guidance or an opinion from another character about their debilitating feelings they are given cold egocentric answers. Travis and Peter Boyle’s Wizard talking curbside outside a diner, Bill in bed talking to his wife Eileen played by Eileen Walsh (who also stars in a film The Magdalene Sisters - depicting life within a penance and rehabilitation missionary), says he’s “always been soft hearted”.

The greatest achievement of Small Things Like These is its restraint and ability to immerse the viewer not only in Bill’s mind but to feel his soul. Bill’s faith and hope in people carries him throughout the film; everything he sees and reflects on tries to break him and shatter his beliefs by convincing him of reality. This is what gives the film its spirituality when faith in religion wavers. The film’s characters pray, attend mass and express their faith. However, do they believe in what they practice? Bill’s entire journey throughout the film tries to answer this. Cillian Murphy is one of the best modern actors to communicate dialogue using body language. Every feeling, mannerism, and thought Bill conveys is done with his eyes. Compared to his award-winning performance as Oppenheimer from last year’s film of the same name, Murphy’s performance as Bill may arguably be the greatest and most overlooked of his career. A labourer of love carrying faith and belief on his shoulders, every step leading closer to the underworld. Afflicted by the inability to communicate, Bill professes his feelings with gestures big and small, his selflessness a platitude and reminder for how people should always be not just during the holiday season.

Dilan Fernando graduated with a degree in Communications from Brock University. ”Written sentiments are more poetic than spoken word. Film will always preserve more than digital could ever. Only after a great film experience can one begin to see all that life has to offer.“