THE QUIET GIRL
Cert 12A
In cinemas now
“Many’s the person who’s missed the opportunity to say nothing,” says Andrew Bennett’s farmer in writer-director Colm Bairéad’s beautifully crafted debut feature.
He’s standing up for neglected Cáit (played by 12-year-old Catherine Clinch), a little girl whose quietness marks her out as an outsider. That same sentiment runs through this understated drama.
The setting is a farm on the south-east coast of Ireland in the early 1980s, where Irish is the first language (English subtitles are provided), and where Cáit is spending the school summer holidays with two relatives she had never met before.
The neglected child has been raised alongside four raucous sisters by a thuggish dad (Michael Patric) and exhausted mum (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh).
With their new baby due within weeks, Cáit’s bed-wetting and unhappiness feel too much like hard work. So her parents leave
her with Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), one of her mum’s cousins who lives with her equally quiet farmer husband Seán (Bennett) in rural Waterford.
Over the long summer holiday, the girl slowly gets the attention she craves and develops a bond with the kindly couple.
Bairéad stirs in dark comedy as Cáit encounters local gossip Úna (Joan Sheehy) who quizzes the girl about Eibhlín’s homelife (“Does she use butter or margarine?”) and reveals important details about her past. But this isn’t a film that depends on plot. What makes it so compelling and touching is how we see the world from the perspective of this withdrawn but very watchful little girl.
Observing the world through Cáit’s eyes, small things – like Seán silently leaving her a biscuit on a kitchen table – become the stuff of truly great drama.