Premiering at Berlinale before his Oscar win for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer but now arriving many months after, Cillian Murphy will next be seen in Small Things Like These. Also starring Emily Watson, Michelle Fairley, and Eileen Walsh, Tim Mielants’ Berlinale opener will now arrive on November 8 from Lionsgate and now the first trailer has landed.
Here’s the synopsis: “Oscar® winner Cillian Murphy delivers a stunning performance as devoted father Bill Furlong in this film based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Claire Keegan. While working as a coal merchant to support his family, he discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent — and uncovers truths of his own — forcing him to confront his past and the complicit silence of a small Irish town controlled by the Catholic Church.”
Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Murphy, who developed the film with the producer Alan Moloney and his Oppenheimer co-star Matt Damon, gives a characteristically tender, interior performance as a man burdened with a conscious even heavier than his considerable knitwear. Unflappable as the icy Sister Mary, Emily Watson takes a scalpel to the kind of scenes a lesser actor would approach with an axe. Through small references (on a radio, we hear reports of the prizefighter Barry McGuigan), Meliants nods to the beginning of an era when Ireland’s national pride swelled. Seemingly going on little more than a gut feeling, Furling appears as a man not fully convinced by it all. There are shades of Rust Cole in his downcast performance, even Joe from You Were Never Really Here. There’s a few instances where Meliants shows him looking out from the coal shed, half-visible in the soot and fading light, a little war being waged in his head. To act or not to act––a small thing indeed.”
See the trailer and poster below.
