There have been more emotional films about the great shame of modern Ireland, the state’s complicity with the Catholic church’s infamous “Magdalene Laundries, which imprisoned pregnant young women in convents, forced them to work for convent for-profit laundry services and made them to give up their children for adoption. “Philomena,” is merely the most celebrated screen account of this crime.

But no film has picked at the scab of cultural complicity as well as “Small Things Like These,” an adaptation of an awared-winning Claire Keegan novel. It takes aim at the conspiracy of silence that most Irish rationalized when confronted with this cruel horror in their midst perpetrated by the shadow state that was, for decades, the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Tim Mielants’ film is a showcase for brooding Oscar winner Cillian Murphy, perfectly cast as a father and coal deliveryman forced to face a great wrong he sees being perpetrated by the convent in his town, Wexford, in the 1980s.

Bill Furlong (“Oppenheimer’s” Murphy) runs a coal, firewood, propane and turf-as-fuel delivery business in the early ’80s, a father of four girls who finishes each day vigorously scrubbing the coal off his fingers so that he can enjoy the pleasures of family life without bringing “work” home with him.

Wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) is the one doing most of the raising of this elementary school to high school quartet, with the oldest daughter sharp enough to balance Da’s books at the business. Sad-faced Bill always has a smile for his girls, but keeps his wants and needs small, and keeps his own counsel about what’s going on in his heart.

Flashbacks tell us of a few magical moments from his childhood, and that one life-altering trauma that haunts him to this day.

Then he stumbles into a girl locked in the coal shed at the local convent, one of the legions of young women “in trouble” and thus judged and sentenced — by tradition and by their families — to laboring in a convent laundry while waiting to deliver a baby most will never see.

Bill sees this as a “There but for the grace of God” connection to his own past, and his own present. He’s got four daughters, a couple of whom are getting noticed by the local boys in the golden age of “Come on Eileen” on the radio and MTV. Bill wears his unmarried mother’s surname, and sees no shame in that.

But a conspiracy of silence extends from the convent, whose Mother Superior (Emily Watson, chilling) maintains authority via threats and bribes, something the Church could manage as it controlled not just unwed mothers and out-of-wedlock working class children, but the only functioning sector of the educational system — convent schools.

Locals warn Bill to “keep on the right side of people,” to “keep the bad dog witcha so the good dog don’t bite” and the like.

His wife, Eileen, with two girls yet to be accepted by the Catholic school, is more sanguine.

 “If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.”

If there’s a clearer “go along to get along” acquiesence to immoral rule, I’ve yet to ear it.

Bill struggles with his childhood (Louis Kirwan is Young Bill) memories. And the sight of a teen girl, shocked and shattered and ill-used, is almost too much to bear. Guilt, duty and compliance go to war for his mortal soul.

Flemish director Mielants (“Wil,””Patrick”) leans into the wintry holiday season setting of the story, playing up the gloom of working class poverty, which Bill can see in his neighbors and his neighborhood. His wife isn’t complimentary about his “soft” touch. But we recognize it as human compassion following an unerring moral compass.

Mielants keeps the camera tight on Murphy, whose eyes reveal hurt and shame over the cowardice he and everyone he knows exhibits when confronted with nuns in service of a cruel, dogmatic system in a church too powerful and too corrupt to see it.

It’s a great performance in a movie with a simple lesson about “compliance” and looking the other way at “official” injustice, something much of the world could take to heart during these holidays, especially in the disunited states of America.

Rating: PG-13, “thematic material” (adult subject matter, cruelty)

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Louis Kirwan, Helen Behan, and Emily Watson.

Credits: Directed by Tim Mielants, scripted by Enda Walsh, based on a novel by Claire Keegan. A FilmNation release.

Running time: 1:38