In the gripping war drama Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy shone as the destroyer of worlds. In the opening film of the Berlinale 2024, he now takes on an evil head nun
More than two decades after his breakthrough in the nerve-wracking zombie film 28 Days Later, Cillian Murphy experienced the biggest year of his career thanks to Oppenheimer. In this mixture of biopic, thriller and war drama, he embodies the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. He has even been nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his outstanding performance.
Now the world is eagerly awaiting his next film: Small Things Like These. The opening film of the Berlinale 2024 takes us back to Ireland in the 1980s and tells the shocking story of the Magdalene homes, where young women were deprived of their freedom and harassed by nuns for decades. The abuses became known through the discovery of a mass grave in 1993.
Opening film of the 2024 Berlinale: Small Things Like These thrives on its bleakness and Cillian Murphy’s acting
Small Things Like These delves into one of the darkest chapters in Irish history. The images in the Berlinale entry by Tim Mielants, who has made a name for himself primarily in the field of series, are correspondingly grim. In the past, Mielants has directed individual episodes of The Terror, Legion and Tales From the Loop. His first collaboration with Murphy: the gangster series Peaky Blinders.
In Small Things Like These, he shows us the sleepy small town of Wexford just before Christmas. The streets are empty and the sky is gray. Small houses are lined up close together, but their crumbling brickwork offers little protection from the cold. Tired people in worn felt coats move sluggishly across the wet asphalt. A cheerless place, the epitome of poverty and hopelessness.
Nevertheless, every day Bill Furlong (Murphy) shoulders the heavy sacks of coal that he drives around the area in his rusty truck. Mielants is interested in every detail: Bill’s dirty hands, marked by the hard work. The sweat running down his forehead and the wrinkles on his face. And the glassy eyes, whose gaze disappears into nowhere, as if he might not even exist.
When Bill comes home, his wife and five children are waiting in a confined space, writing wish lists to Santa Claus. He sits impassively, almost invisibly, at the kitchen table, which, despite the bleakness on display, is a sign of pure life. Eileen (Eileen Walsh) gently touches his shoulder as he passes by. This inconspicuous gesture from his wife is the foundation of the family
Creepier than the atomic bomb: After Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy takes on an evil head nun
The moment when the freshly written wish lists land directly in the fireplace after the children have gone to bed is particularly tear-jerking. Brutal, but understandable in its simple consequence. The lights of the local Christmas tree are the greatest gift in the darkness. Apart from that … A new shirt? Or a book? David Copperfield, perhaps. Bill could read that over the holidays. A fantasy.
This year, however, the festivities are not all that contemplative. The screams of a young woman being rudely taken to the nearby convent by her parents cause a stir. Bill stands like a ghost in the shadow of the doorway leading into the shed where he delivers the coal for the nuns. The apathy with which he moves through his life cannot go on forever.
Mielants does not spell out what happens behind the closed doors of the church facility. Bill’s perspective does give us disturbing insights into the horror. But the director is much more interested in the silence that hangs over Wexford. For minutes on end, he observes Murphy as he maneuvers his character through the dreariness without telling us what he has experienced, what he has seen.
Bill can no longer bear his own inaction, but also finds himself in a power dynamic in which he can barely afford to stand up for others, let alone himself. The influence of the nuns, above all head sister Mary (outrageous: Emily Watson), reaches too deep into the roots of the small town. Bill is shaking inside as if he’s going to burst, but the exhaustion is too great even for that.
Small Things Like These lets us experience every inner tremor in Cillian Murphy’s play up close
Few actors can suffer on screen as well as Murphy, especially when the camera takes us up close to every quivering pore in his face with close-ups. First in Oppenheimer, he thrilled as a tortured man who is confronted with the consequences of his actions and almost breaks under the cheers of the public after his weapon of mass destruction is successfully fired.
It is one of the most impressive scenes in Oppenheimer: in the roaring crowd, Murphy’s scientist sees only the suffering and death he has brought upon the world. But he is trapped in the here and now, in his body. No escape. Just a pulsation of panic. Bill in Small Things Like These is of course a completely different character, but here too Murphy’s play perfectly sums up the struggle.
Although at first we only watch Bill through filthy windows, his restlessness eventually takes over the entire movie. He would love to scream, but the strict world in which he moves doesn’t allow it. He can only escape into memory, where his own trauma awaits, although Mielants definitely tells too much in this case. The interwoven flashbacks are the weakest part of the movie.
To read on: A look back at Cillian Murphy’s career before Oppenheimer
But as long as Small Things Like These sticks to Murphy’s every move, it’s one of the stronger Berlinale openers of recent years. Not a big, loud work à la Oppenheimer that dominates the discourse for months. Rather a quiet, whispering rumination in which Murphy is able to formulate his introspective drama in devastating images.
