A fascinating film Small Things Like These has premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on 15th February 2024. The movie is produced by Cillian Murphy, the star in Oppenheimer. Interestingly, the ace producer plays a major role in the drama too.
This film is based on a novel of the same title which was published in 2021. Its story covers the lives of “fallen women” who lived in the Magdalene asylums of Ireland. Impressively, the book won the Orwell prize in 2022, which makes it worthy of a read and the movie worth a watch.
Claire Keegan, the author of this fiction has also written The Quiet Girl, on which an Irish Blockbuster movie was created. Thus, we have high expectations from Small Things Like These once it hits local cinema.
The movie would be covering social topics like “the need for feminism,” status of women in the Irish society (that too in the recent past), and treatment of ignored sections of the society. It emphasizes on the conflict between the ethics of protestant Christianity in the country and its true meaning.
Murphy was questioned on how he discovered the book on which he based his movie. He replied that he was always fond of Claire Keegan as an author and found the book impressive. While the actor-producer initially thought that he was too late to score the rights to making a movie out of the novel, he wasn’t. Thus, he grabbed the opportunity pronto.
Small Things Like These is on a very different theme from Oppenheimer, thus a comparison is not possible, but Cillian had a reason to pick the subject. He said, “I felt that we could make a beautiful, meditative film that was very atmospheric and emotional. It already had what most scripts really struggle with: a killer ending.” As an actor in the movie, adjusting to the role was a challenge for him, but being an Irish, this film was more than mere entertainment project for him.
The shooting location was New Ross, same as mentioned in the novel. Though, it was chosen for more than one reasons – the second being that the place hadn’t been used in movies before. Interestingly, the community was also very helpful. Murphy said, “It couldn’t have been more helpful. They were also delighted that we were there. We cast a lot of the kids locally, we cast a lot of the background artists locally. All the counselors and the local politicians and everybody couldn’t have been more helpful in giving us access to the streets.”
While the summary of the novel states that the story was set in 1985, the film’s arena might seem more like from the 1950s. it isn’t specifically stated in the drama, but the storyline makes it obvious.