Small Things Like These (2024, dir. Tim Mielants): A Hand for Small Things

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How could such a horrific act have been tolerated for decades?

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Great evil tends to be solemn. It is exposed through stark contrasts and grave scores, denouncing the system’s substance or the perpetrator’s face. The audience’s anger is an honest one that needs no belittling, yet the texture of that response is cleaner than one might think. It ends with pointing fingers at villains from a safe distance, using that gesture to confirm one’s own ethical sensibility; the emotional arc, in turn, is as grand as the evil itself.

Tim Mielants approaches great evil through the small agonies of small individuals. Instead of asking “Who committed such a horrific act,” he asks, “How could such a horrific act have been tolerated for decades?” Faced with this new question, small spectators are no longer at ease.

Despite its ostensibly heroic ending, Bill Furlong remains, throughout, a man who shrinks into himself. He is no figure of resistance. Rather, he is one who has diligently held his place within a system of silence and secured a stable life — unaware, perhaps, but nonetheless a beneficiary of that system, even its participant. The happiness of his cherished family was guaranteed by maintaining an unspoken good relationship with the convent; the fact that his five daughters could be educated was also because the convent existed. All the while, he has been contributing to its operation by hauling coal, unknowingly. That filth remains clearly on his hands and face, unwashed.

Eileen Furlong is the personification of the system’s logic lodged within Bill. This is why Eileen Walsh delivers several key lines in a whisper. “Don’t get involved in unnecessary trouble,” “Think of our daughters’ future” — these are indistinguishable from the voice of self-censorship Bill would have repeated to himself. The film persistently interrogates how social complicity in serving great evil is not the collusion of exceptional villains, but the accumulation of realistic choices made by ordinary individuals trying to preserve their everyday lives. Before directing attention to external evil, it first presents the possibility of complicity internalized within oneself. And as long as that possibility exists, tragedy can recur in altered forms at any time. Thus, the way complicity fractures must also be profoundly internal and small: the frightened face of a girl encountered by chance, her bare feet trembling in the cold — immediate acts of witnessing.

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Collapsed, Bill becomes isolated, stripped of ethical direction. Everything demands that he turn away: the norms of the society to which he belongs, his wife’s practical advice, the tacit silence of neighbors, the order enforced by the Mother Superior. In a conventional narrative about someone confronting great evil, the protagonist would, at this point, arm himself with grand convictions — justice, human rights, religion. But Mielants firmly refuses the heroic narrative. The Bill he envisions, and the small public reflected in him, are not beings who appeal to such universal and abstract values.

Mrs. Wilson is the one who taught Bill the most primitive form of human duty before the logic of a corrupt society took hold. When the entire community treated him — a child of an unmarried mother — as a potential delinquent, she fed and educated him without any expectation of return. The memory of her is, for Bill, an experience of a concrete “debt” one human being owes another, prior to any social code or religious teaching. Accordingly, the sense of responsibility he feels before the girl’s suffering is not a grand sentiment like humanitarianism, but closer to an instinctive obligation to repay the warmth he once received. The Mother Superior offers tea and biscuits, inquiring after Bill’s well-being while alluding to his daughters’ future — a chilling scene that condenses the logic of reward and punishment a system offers to the individual. The rational calculus of gain and loss collides endlessly with the memory of Mrs. Wilson that resides within him.

Individual complicity is not a simple opposition between good and evil. It is a collision between a small responsibility — to protect one’s family as its head — and another small responsibility — to uphold the minimal duty of being human. The director replaces the solemn anguish of a hero with the realistic dilemma of an ordinary breadwinner torn between survival and conscience. Thus, personal courage is not fearless confidence, but merely a solitary choice not to betray one’s internal principles despite fear.

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Many films dealing with historical tragedy attempt, in one way or another, to find a thread of public resolution — hinting at the realization of social justice or the possibility of historical judgment. But in the ending, Bill, after saving the girl, does not take her into a public arena of discourse — a square, a police station. He does not cry out the truth toward a cross, nor does he erupt in anger toward the townspeople. He simply holds her hand and walks in silence toward his home, his private and everyday space. It is the moment where the film’s aesthetics shine. The proper stance before a vast history such as the Magdalene Laundries is not to defer it as a problem for society to resolve, but to bring it into one’s own life in the concrete form of “a girl shivering in the cold,” and to take responsibility for it.

For that reason, the final image of Bill’s back cannot be “victory” or “hope.” It is not the glorious exit of a hero, but merely the starting point of a solitary and heavy responsibility that opens onto the hardship to come. The spectator anticipates the despair of the wife he will face upon entering the living room, the coldness of the town, the crisis of his livelihood — all that Bill must endure. The director refuses all cheap compensation, consolation, or sentiment. He simply makes one confront how burdensome it is for a small individual to uphold a small conscience.

The dignity of an individual is not proven through grand revolutions that change the world. It lies in the solitary attitude of taking responsibility for one’s choice to the very end, regardless of outcome — in the image of a small human being bearing, with his own back, a single fragment of vast history in its entirety.

Note: Originally written in Korean, with English translation assisted by AI. Appreciate you reading.