Emily Watson also appears in Tim Mielants’ film, adapted from the novella by Claire Keegan, which deals with intergenerational trauma and the Church-sanctioned cruelty of Ireland’s past.

Unlike Peter Mullan’s searing 2008 Venice Golden Lion winner, The Magdalene Sisters, or Joni Mitchell’s piercingly sad ballad, “The Magdalene Laundries,” the name given to the notorious workhouse institutions controlled by Irish religious orders is never spoken in Small Things Like These. But its Biblical evocation of the “fallen woman” is clear as a bell in this acutely affecting drama about how a glimpse of cruelty behind convent walls reopens the psychological wounds of a kind family man who has strived to build a life untainted by the stigma and sorrow of his childhood.

The actor’s work here could scarcely be more of a contrast to his fine-grained characterization as the soft-spoken but imposing title figure in Oppenheimer, with his hint of arrogance that chafes against so many peers. Bill is a reserved but profoundly decent man who appears to have spent his adult years taking up as little space as possible. Murphy fleshes him out with loaded silences and pained gestures, his pale, expressive eyes conveying a world of hurt, of trauma yanked back to the surface by startling experience.

One of Ireland’s leading contemporary authors, Keegan wrote the short story, Foster, that became the basis of the wondrous The Quiet Girl. The same clear-eyed compassion that graced Colm Bairéad’s film elevates this similarly small-scaled but wholly satisfying new adaptation. It’s subtle but resonant, intimate but emotionally expansive and at every step crisply unsentimental.

While the Magdalene Laundries, sometimes referred to as asylums, operated from the late 18th century, what’s most shocking about the shameful historical chapter is how long it was allowed to continue thanks to the complicit silence of a country under the thumb of the Catholic Church. It’s estimated that between 1922, when the Irish Free State was established, and 1996, when the last of the laundries was closed, more than 10,000 women were institutionalized and forced into unpaid labor. Many were unwed mothers whose babies were taken from them and given up for adoption.

Early indicators — Bill’s workers discuss a Barry McGuigan boxing match; a Dexys Midnight Runners song plays in the background at the pub — place the action in the mid-1980s. But like the setting of The Quiet Girl, the town of New Ross in Wexford County shows so little evidence of change it could be mistaken for 20 or even 30 years earlier. Frequent Mielants DP collaborator Frank van den Eeden shoots the narrow streets and unfancy homes in grays and browns that lean almost into sepia, with flashbacks to Bill’s childhood that have the look of hand-tinted vintage photographs. The textured sense of place is transporting.

A delivery to the Good Shepherd Convent, separated only by a wall from the high school Bill’s smart eldest daughter Kathleen (Liaden Dunlea) attends, leaves Bill badly shaken. Standing half-hidden in the dark coal shed doorway, he witnesses a distraught young woman pleading with her mother and physically resisting before being forcibly placed in the nuns’ hands.

An encounter with the shy young son of a town alcoholic the same day further stirs up Bill’s vulnerability. When he remarks at home that he gave the kid some loose change, Eileen gently chides him for being soft-hearted. That moment is echoed later when his pragmatic wife tells him: “If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.”

Walsh, who starred as one of the four young women at the center of The Magdalene Sisters, is excellent in the couple’s quiet moments alone. She seems torn between genuine concern for Bill and nervousness that anything he says publicly that could be considered hostile to the Church might expose them to disapproval in the community.