Perhaps it’s appropriate that a story about a coal man should be an extremely slow burn, but there isn’t much warmth for the beleaguered protagonist of this wintry drama. Typically, Cillian Murphy has used his newfound Oscar-winner clout to go back to Ireland and work again with his Disco Pigs collaborator Enda Walsh on an adaptation of a sparely worded novel by Claire Keegan (who also wrote Foster, which became The Quiet Girl). The result is remarkably powerful, even if it’s understated to the point of wordlessness.
Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a father of five daughters with a kindly heart but taciturn demeanour. He has secrets in his past that make him, perhaps, unusually sympathetic to the girls brought into the local convent because they are “in trouble”, as it was euphemistically called, but every personal and social pressure counsels him against speaking out, lest the powerful church turn against his business, his family and himself. And Bill himself is not exactly one for speaking, so that his empathy and turmoil are largely expressed through long looks and the occasional heavy breath.
Murphy doesn’t do a lot, much of the time, but he doesn’t do it magnetically.
This is, of course, how Ireland’s national scandal of the Magdalene laundries was allowed to survive, abusing tens of thousands of women who became pregnant outside marriage and their children. But Keegan’s book and Walsh’s script are more interesting in exploring the silence around the scandal, the forces that kept people from speaking out, or even seeing that anything was wrong. Director Tim Mielants isn’t exactly subtle about where his sympathies lie, and the likely bent of the film – we open with a church looming over a town, bells discordantly waking the populace, before cutting to a raven atop a cross – but he places the film squarely on Murphy’s shoulders and lets him set the pace, which proves wise.
Murphy doesn’t do a lot, much of the time, but he doesn’t do it magnetically. Even in the film’s biggest confrontation, with Emily Watson’s Mother Superior – as thuggishly self-assured as any Mafia don and twice as ruthless – he holds himself still and somehow curled in on himself, and yet you can’t look away.
This is not a traditionally satisfying film; Furlong has no huge show of defiance or last-act fisticuffs with a sinister sister. But it shows that an individual can carve out space for a matter of conscience, and escape a conspiracy of silence or of their own fears. Despite the rain and the cold, the quiet, reserved coal man finds some warmth and strength to offer, and there’s hope for us all in that.