Editor's note: The following article contains spoilers for "Small Things Like These."

An Irish-born coal vendor bedeviled by memories of a Dickensian childhood arrives at the local convent for a routine coal delivery. Bill Furlong has spent the last several nights nocturnal and restless, milling about the house, staring at streetlights and passersby. His five young daughters appear aloof to his troubles but Bill's wife, Eileen, has taken notice. He is silent; she is suspicious.

After dropping off the coal shipment, Bill enters the convent to deliver an invoice. He is greeted by the sound of muffled screams and soon discovers young girls, terrified and disheveled, scrubbing floors like indentured servants. One girl runs towards Bill and begs to be saved, but her plea is interrupted by a Catholic sister who chastises him for entering unannounced. Back at home (and more disturbed than ever), Bill confides in Eileen about what he witnessed.

"It's none of our business," she says. "If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore."

A moody, quiet storm of a film about secrets and those who keep them, "Small Things Like These," based on the 2021 novel by Claire Keegan, thrusts a riveting Cillian Murphy ("Oppenheimer," "Peaky Blinders") into moral peril when family, acquaintances and respected women religious advise him to disregard what he has witnessed.

The film, set in 1985, melds fact and fiction regarding an appalling period in Irish and Catholic history: the decades-long operation of asylums-cum-slave camps where orphaned girls, abused women, sex workers and unwed mothers were cut off from society and forced to labor under prison-like, sometimes fatal, conditions.