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Us humans aren’t brave by default
Small Things Like These (2024)
(Beware, spoilers below.)
I reckon maybe we were, sometime, in the long ago, when the call came in the dark cold night for us to walk out of the cave and face the monster. Aye, I think we were once, only we’ve forgot.
It must’ve grown dormant, our bravery, while we were learning to love the heel on our throat. But it still wakes, occasionally, when we’re pushed to the limit, when something primal within ourselves remembers the fear and pride at our feet walking out into the long, terrible darkness.
Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, and Eileen Walsh, Small Things Like These is the long-awaited cinematic adaptation of the eponymous (stellar) short novel by Claire Keegan. The film follows Bill Furlong (Murphy), a coal man and devoted father who becomes tormented by a terrible dark truth in his community — the existence of a Magdalene “mother and baby home”. Deeply disturbed by a run-in with one of the teenage girls imprisoned there, Bill begins rethinking his (and everyone else’s) shameful silence. The community’s widespread fear of Mother Mary (Watson).
To those of us not immediately familiar with the Magdalene atrocities (nor indeed what it means to live in such a profoundly religious community), Bill’s fear might appear trite…
