A Belgian television director turned specialist in quiet men who cannot say what is wrong with them. Small Things Like These is where to start; its quietness is what we admire and what will send some viewers to bed early.
Fi1m perspective
Bill Furlong comes in from the coal round and scrubs the black out of his hands while his wife and daughters get on with the evening around him. Nobody remarks on it. That is the Tim Mielants scene in Small Things Like These (2024), and on the evidence so far it is the Mielants scene generally: a man doing something ordinary with his hands because he has no words for what is in his head. Cillian Murphy barely speaks in the film and does not need to. Mielants trusts a face and a task to carry a scene, and most of the time they do.
He came up through Flemish television, Super 8 (2009), Code 37 (2011–2012) and Cordon (2014), then The Tunnel and all six episodes of the third series of Peaky Blinders (2016). That is roughly where, in our view, Steven Knight's saga began to grow grander and slower and fall in love with its own walk; how much of that is Mielants and how much Knight we would not claim to know from six episodes. American series followed, Legion and The Terror, then a feature debut, Patrick (2019), which he also wrote: an absurdist comedy set in a naturist camp, about as far from a coal lorry as a film can get. Since then he has led The Responder (2022), with Martin Freeman, made Wil (2023), a wartime drama about complicity, and followed Small Things Like These with Steve (2025).
Small Things Like These is the film to judge him by, and it is a good one. Enda Walsh's script keeps Claire Keegan's novella at its own scale, and Mielants keeps his camera outside the convent, at the gate and in the yard, so the film is about a town that knows and does not look rather than about the nuns. Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters (2002) went inside and was furious; Mielants stays out and is quiet, and for this story that is right. We were moved more than we expected by how little he lets happen in that yard: a man, a lorry, a gate, and a decision he can feel coming and keeps not making. The camera, in the documentary manner he favours, is kept still and unemphatic, and the cold is deliberate.
The habit that lets him down is explaining. The film tells us about Bill's past more often than Keegan did and more often than we needed, and it is an odd fault in a director whose whole method is leaving things out; it suggests a nerve that fails at the last moment. He has said of the film that "When you're silent, you're complicit." His best scenes let us reach that ourselves. His weaker ones put it on a plate.
He keeps his collaborators close, Murphy three times now and the cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert as often, and the Murphy partnership is worth keeping, since he is the rare actor who can hold a long silence without asking for credit. Start with Small Things Like These, on a quiet evening, and do not expect it to raise its voice.
Biography
Tim Mielants is a Belgian film and television director. He was born on 11 December 1979 in Mortsel, Belgium, and studied at Campus Sint-Lukas in Brussels. He began his career directing Flemish television series including Code 37 (2011–2012), Cordon (2014) and Professor T. (2015).
Mielants has directed episodes of international series such as Peaky Blinders (2016, all six episodes of series 3), Legion (2017–2018), The Terror (2018) and Tales from the Loop (2020). He served as lead director on the BBC series The Responder (2022), for which he received BAFTA and Emmy nominations. His feature films include Patrick (2019), for which he won the Best Director prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Wil (2023) and Small Things Like These (2024), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. He is also credited as director on the forthcoming Steve (2025).
