Claire Keegan’s Kirkus-starred 2021 novel, Small Things Like These, is, in many ways, a study in smallness, in that it focuses on a single, powerful idea. The brisk, 114-page story centers on a single character: a hardworking coal and timber merchant in the small town of New Ross, Ireland, in 1985. He ruminates on his upbringing as the son of an unmarried single mother who died when he was a child; he worries about making ends meet and about the well-being of his wife, Eileen, and his young daughters; and “lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls.”

He does get some hints. After he gives a poor child some spare change, his wife chastises him: “You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?” Another time, he witnesses a desperate boy drinking milk out of a cat’s bowl outside a priest’s home, and it’s a memory that stays with him.

One evening, he makes a coal delivery to a local convent, which also serves as a “training school” for girls. He’d heard rumors that the place is actually a home for young women who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock; there, it was said, they lived in abusive, prisonlike conditions, forced to work for the convent’s laundry business. He witnesses some of these women polishing the floor, and one of them begs him to take her away from there, back to his home, or to the river, where she can drown herself. A nun quickly ushers him out before he can react, but the incident haunts him. On a return visit, he finds another young woman freezing in a coal shed, which the Mother Superior unconvincingly tries to portray as a game of hide-and-seek gone wrong. People in Furlong’s life, including his spouse, tell him to leave it alone—the church is powerful, they say, and they could make life difficult for him if he steps out of line.

A faithful new film adaptation of Keegan’s novel, starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson, premieres in theaters on Nov. 8.

Keegan drew inspiration from Ireland’s real-life Magdalene laundries, in which thousands of young women were imprisoned and suffered horrific abuse; many died. (The brilliant 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters tells a fictionalized story of four women at one such place.) The novel also makes clear the Catholic Church’s influence on every aspect of small-town Irish life, and the fear that this engenders throughout society. But the book, and the resulting film, are less about the church than they are about a central question: What responsibility does a person have for others?

The choice to look beyond oneself—beyond one’s self-interest, one’s narrow view, one’s petty needs—shouldn’t be so hard; compassion and kindness shouldn’t be the exception. Keegan’s book, and its adaptation, take the position that selfishness is, in fact, the norm, and that pushing back against that default is absolutely necessary. This is not specific to Ireland, of course, or any country; history shows that cruelty knows no borders and entire political movements are built around valorizing amorality and bigotry. It’s a disheartening and depressing thing to witness in action, and it can make a person lose faith in humanity. But, as Keegan’s hero tells himself, “was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”

The film, directed by Tim Mielants and written by Enda Walsh (Hunger), relates this message with a quiet power, thanks in part to thoughtful performances by Murphy as the deeply troubled Furlong, Watson as the convent’s chilling Mother Superior, and Zara Devlin as Sarah, a girl in crisis. However, the film is less an acting showcase than it is a vehicle for a timely and necessary lesson—one, it seems, that must be repeated over and over again.

Fighting for what’s right can be frightening, to be sure—especially when one goes up against powerful forces, such as a church or a government. Furlong, as he makes a pivotal choice at the end of the novel and film, acknowledges the overwhelming nature of his own fear, but “in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.” This book and film may well kindle similar feelings of hope and belief, and that, surely, is no small thing.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.