The Quiet Girl
Directed by Colm Bairéad
(PG-13)
★★★★
A neglected child blossoms under two strangers’ care.
Ireland’s contender for the Best International Film Oscar is “as beautiful as it is devastating,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. In 1981, a neglected 9-year-old is sent by her impoverished parents to spend the summer with relatives—a childless couple with a dairy farm. Though young Cáit, who’s played by newcomer Catherine Clinch, remains silent and withdrawn even as she is afforded loving attention for the first time, “Clinch’s superb acting lets us see how she is changing for the better.” The movie’s adult co-stars are equally fine, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. As Cáit’s new surrogate mother, Carrie Crowley “radiates the sort of immediate love that only comes from great, painful need.” Andrew Bennett, in turn, gives the man of the house a surface gruffness owed to a deep shared grief. As these three wounded people each draw rejuvenating strength from one another, Colm Bairéad’s delicate Irish-language drama “speaks volumes without raising its voice.” An adaptation of Foster, a Claire Keegan novella, The Quiet Girl “has the feel of one of those gemlike short stories in which nothing much happens, but crystalline realizations result from ordinary acts,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Because we watch events unfold as Cáit sees them, Bairéad’s film is “consistently fascinating.” It also “has a lightness in its heart,” and a simple but exhilarating climactic scene “elegantly ties a bow around the whole picture.” (In select theaters)