Something eerie is afoot in the small Irish town of Wexford, where coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) raises five young daughters alongside his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh). It’s Christmastime 1985, the busiest time of the year for the Furlong family business, but Bill is not feeling like himself. An eerie encounter by the town’s convent brings back memories the man kept stashed away for decades, glimpses of his childhood interrupting his carefully concocted routine — the sun filtered through the big windows of a bright manor as Bill methodically rinses grime off his dirtied hands; flashes of a cold stable surfacing as his daughters chatter about homework around the kitchen table. 
Adapted from Claire Keegan’s eponymous novel, Tim Mielants’ Berlinale-opener “Small Things Like These” is built upon what the residents of this small Catholic town do not say and what the audience does not know. Whispers and veiled conversations denounce that all locals are privy to the town’s open secret, able to function either through blissful oblivion or a dire lack of empathy. Bill spent his entire adult life benefiting from a once similarly sturdy survival mechanism, now made flimsy by the haunting image of a young girl dragged out of the convent, her short hair and monochrome uniform reminding Bill of a fate avoided by a precarious sequence of could-have-beens. 
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In this deliberately stunted teasing of information, Mielants builds a muted drama that cleverly harnesses horror tropes to paint a picture of what happens within the convent’s walls. The incessant crying of children and wailing of their mothers echo inside the ancient walls, a cacophony of woes conveniently stifled from the world outside, preserved in perfect stillness. Whenever inside the building, the already small-looking Bill instinctively makes himself smaller, crouching along the labyrinthine corridors and stealing furtive glances at the women working inside the dark manor, never able to hold his gaze. 
Bill is never smaller than when, in the presence of Mother Mary, the head of the institution, played with terrifying efficacy by the great Emily Watson. Their confrontation happens as much else does in “Small Things Like These,” quietly and chillingly. The clinking of a silver spoon in a porcelain cup cuts through the silence that inhabits the room like a heavy fog, the few words exchanged swiftly cauterising any possibility of rebellion. The consequences of defying the system that allows the town to perceive itself as lord-abiding are an unmoving weight Bill prods at alone, driven solely by unwavering compassion and an ever-present awareness of how big of a part luck played in detaching his fate from the one that awaits the girls in uniform. 
The Furlong patriarch is a man of unbridled goodness who stops by the side of the road to check on a farmer’s boy and puts himself in a tricky financial position so his workers can have a slightly more comfortable holiday season. Murphy’s characteristic sternness lends itself to Bill’s burdensome survivor’s guilt, but it serves this mellowness, too, the “Oppenheimer” actor translating this seesawing between sorrow and gratitude through slight changes in posture, a brief hand gesture, an averted glance. The emotional restraint is such that the climax comes through the slow snaking of a tear through his sharp cheekbones, a strained unleashing but an unleashing nonetheless. 
“Small Things Like These” becomes even more affecting once the final title card dedicates the film to the survivors of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, the asylums that inspired Keegan’s fictional convent. Between the 18th century and as recently as the 1990s, the Roman Catholic Church confined an estimated 30,000 women in state-sponsored, church-led organizations designed to house “fallen women.” These institutions are now known for their horrifying enslavement and abuse of dwellers, often unwed mothers and victims of sexual abuse labeled as promiscuous in a rigidly religious country and time. These women, often buried without a name, unseen and unheard, inhabit Mielants’ doleful drama, a strikingly competent encompassing of empathy that refuses to disappear under compliance. [B+]