Cillian Murphy is always a celebration for the large and small screen. This time he travels several decades back, to the eighties in Dublin. He is a coal seller, that keeps his house warm and sells coal for other houses and places to keep them warm in Ireland's cold winter. His five daughters and wife are the apple of his eyes and he would do anything for them.
Until...one day he stumbles into a situation in a monastery, which hosts young catholic girls, sometime against their will, that keeps his confused and torn between his will of normality and his conscience. The catholic church is being criticized here in a way that one can easily be reminded with the classis "The Magdalene Sisters".
During several segments of the movie the past keeps reminding Bill with his childhood traumas. He is described as a generous and simple guy, that wants only to earn money to keep his family on track with food in their bellies, fire in the fireplace and off course proper education, but he still has great virtues and gentle heart, as far as it goes to other people, that their daily suffering doesn't go unnoticed.
It's a slow burner, that is directed with a fine and gentle hand and mindset. It has a lot of criticism, as mentioned, of the church and cynical use of religion to oppress the common folks. On the other side it has a lot of humanity, love and care in it. It feels long, but it is a straight forward film, that catches the essence of the era and state of mind of these days.
I haven't felt always the strong connection between the flashbacks to current plot developments, but all helped to better build the protagonist character and to better understands him and his motivation. Murphy's character has been built well, from a script perspective and also thanks to an enormous performance from Murphy himself.
