As producer and lead actor, Cillian Murphy has brought to the screen a piercingly painful and sad story with a very literary intensity, juxtaposing the detail of the present with flashback memories of the past. It is about Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries: the church’s homes for unwed mothers who were made to work in an atmosphere of wretchedness and shame and had their babies taken away and sold to foster parents. Enda Walsh has adapted the much admired novel by Claire Keegan and the director is Tim Mielants.

This subdued but absorbing and eventful film is rather different from Peter Mullan’s extravagant The Magdalene Sisters – which also featured Eileen Walsh in its cast – and different also from Stephen Frears’ bittersweet dramedy Philomena. Murphy shows us once again his sightless stare of fear and pain, as the witness to something terrible not just in the real world but within himself. He plays Bill, a coalman in County Wexford in the early 80s; a soft-spoken, thoughtful man who has built up a good business through years of hard work, though money worries are never far way. He is married to Eileen (Walsh), and they have many daughters whose education comes courtesy of the church and whose future weddings will doubtless cause more worry and expense.

One Christmas, good-hearted Bill appears to be on the verge of a midlife breakdown. Long submerged memories are rising to the surface, and he is in the habit of getting up in the middle of the night to make tea and gaze out of the window. He stops his van one day to talk to a poor boy who is pitiably collecting sticks, claiming only to want them for his dog but obviously, in the most un-Christmassy way, gathering winter fuel. Bill is assailed by his own memories of Christmas poverty: getting a hot water bottle for a present instead of the longed-for jigsaw puzzle.

And then the film shows something breaking his gloomy pain into the open, a terrible revelation that he has somehow been expecting. Delivering coal to the church laundry – a place from which locals avert their eyes, as if from Dracula’s castle – he walks straight in and sees the terrified girls for himself, like abused serfs. Each of them, he realises, resembles his own poor unmarried mother, who would assuredly have ended up in a place like this had she not been taken in by a wealthy local woman. The church sister – a dead-eyed performance of cool bureaucratic tyranny from Emily Watson – is icily aware that Bill is now in possession of a secret that could damage her and that, as a man, his (possible) objection would carry far more weight than one from the town’s women. But she has his daughters’ educational future in her hands.

There is something very Dickensian in this story, signalled by Bill’s boyhood ownership of David Copperfield, though with a fierce pessimism and anger that Dickens might not have favoured. And the ending is deeply strange; is it actually happening or not? I was so rapt, so caught up in this film, that I wasn’t aware that it was going to be the ending until the screen faded to black. It is an absorbing, committed drama.

• Small Things Like These screened at the Berlin film festival