The Quiet Girl
An Cailín Ciúin

Using a sensitive and understated directorial hand, Colm Bairéad adapts Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella Foster into an astonishingly affecting work of repressed emotion. Bairéad’s debut feature is as quiet as its titular protagonist. Nine-year-old Cáit, a neglected girl from a large family in rural Ireland, is played magnificently by newcomer Catherine Clinch. Clinch is one of those child actors who conveys a wealth of information about her character simply through her eyes, posture, and stillness. The way Bairéad and cinematographer Kate McCullough capture their lead's subtle behaviors is a marvel.

The story is set in southern Ireland in the summer of 1981 when Cáit&rsqus family is expecting yet another child to be born from the loveless marriage her parents (and siblings) endure. Cáit’s parents decide to send her off to live with her mother's distant cousin for the entire summer. The reasons are not fully explained to the child, just like pretty much everything else she experiences. Her older siblings certainly don't offer her any guidance. Cáit has never met the childless, middle-aged couple she’s to go stay with. They live on a dairy farm a good three-hour drive away. And even though they welcome her into their home, Cáit is overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of her new surroundings.

What follows is a seemingly simple, unadorned coming-of-age tale that packs layers of complexity into each small action or abridged conversation. The movie unfolds through young eyes, unable to comprehend the full meaning behind most of what she witnesses or encounters. The story plays out entirely in linear time but has the evocative qualities of a memory film. This sense that we're watching a character taking in information she may not fully understand until she’s much older is far less overt than Charlotte Wells's Aftersun, but it leaves the viewer with a similar sensation when the picture is over. The many details of Cáit’s home life and how it differs from that of this older, kinder couple she's come to live with are sometimes enigmatic and sometimes harshly spelled out for her by secondary characters. For the adult viewer, everything comes across with crystal clarity, and we find ourselves growing more and more curious about how much Cáit understands and, more keenly, what she’s feeling from moment to moment.

The filmmakers' ability to enable audiences to tap into the feelings of this introverted protagonist is what makes the picture so special. We are often several steps ahead of Cáit in terms of comprehending everything that unfolds or has occurred in the past, but that’s what enables a wellspring of emotion to burst forth inside us when she does access parts of herself unreached before. This is not a movie about big reveals concerning major, deep-dark secrets. It is about everyday sentiments—the desire to connect, to be loved, to give love, to make a difference for someone. Set in a milieu in which direct conversations about personal feelings are not the norm and often occur only in situations of gossip or with the intention of causing harm, the accessing and parsing of emotion in all of these characters feel as cinematic as any elaborately staged camera move—in fact, more so.

In addition to the magnificent Clinch, the cast is pitch-perfect, especially the duo who play the couple Cáit spends the summer with. As Eibhlín, Carrie Crowley possesses the same quiet stillness Clinch brings to Cáit. Her lovely face and wise eyes convey as much of what she’s come to understand over many decades as Clinch’s face conveys her distinct lack of life experience. Andrew Bennett plays Seán as a man who is careful at first about opening his heart to the child who has come to live in his home, for good reason, we soon learn. Still, over the summer, he becomes a far truer father to the girl than her real "Da" could ever manage. Most of these characters speak Irish to each other, with the exception of Cáit’s father (Michael Patric), whose insistence on speaking only English is one of the many things that keep him separate from his daughter, his wife, and his other children.

The film's use of the Irish language and the dialect specific to this region feels significant in ways I, a non-Irish speaker, can't fully comprehend. But in a country where only a small minority of the population speaks the national language, a certain connection is conveyed among the characters when they speak in their mother tongue.