His latest role, coal merchant Bill Furlong in the film ‘Small Things Like This’ sees ‘Oppenheimer’ Oscar winner Cillian Murphy wrestle with confronting the Catholic Church.
The Cork native plays a father haunted by secret abuses in a local convent. In the new trailer, we see Furlong delivering coal to the convent, where he witnesses a mother forcing her young daughter inside and against her will.
The child is screaming: “Mommy, please! Stop it! No please! I’m not going in there,” as a silent Furlong watches on.
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‘Small Things Like This’ is set in 1985 just ahead of Christmas. As he makes further deliveries to the convent, Furlong, is forced to confront his own unspoken grief and childhood trauma, which leads him into making a moral choice.
“You want to watch what you say, about what’s there,” Furlong is warned in the trailer as he sees first-hand the atrocities taking place in the local convent.
The film has been adapted from Claire Keegan’s prize-winning novella. Enda Walsh wrote the film’s, it was directed by Tim Mielants and also stars Emily Watson.
The backdrop for the film is the real history of the Magdalene Laundries, asylums and workhouses run by the Catholic Church in Ireland, supposedly for the purpose of employing and educating “fallen women.”
The Magdalene Laundries were eventually closed down in 1996. There followed a well-publicised and investigated scandal in Ireland involving the Catholic Church.
Reviewing ‘Small Things Like These’ following its opening night screening at the Berlin Film Festival, The Hollywood reporter said: “Cillian Murphy’s work here could scarcely be more of a contrast to his fine-grained characterization as the soft-spoken but imposing title figure in Oppenheimer, with his hint of arrogance that chafes against so many peers.
“Bill [Furlong] is a reserved but profoundly decent man who appears to have spent his adult years taking up as little space as possible.
“Murphy fleshes him out with loaded silences and pained gestures, his pale, expressive eyes conveying a world of hurt, of trauma yanked back to the surface by startling experience.”
