The Quiet Girl

A film set in Ireland in the summer of 1981. Cáit is nine. She is growing up in a crowded, poor, disordered family; her mother is pregnant again, her father is indifferent and nobody at school notices her. She is sent to distant relatives for the summer. The house she goes to is quiet and orderly. The couple who live there give her something she is not used to: attention. Her hair is brushed, she is listened to when she speaks, they do the work together. The whole narrative is built on that change and contains almost no incident. There is a loss in the household's own past, and the film does not state it; it places the clues at the edges of scenes. The source is Claire Keegan's short novel. It was made largely in Irish and was nominated for the international feature Oscar, the first Irish-language film in that category. Catherine Clinch plays Cáit in her first film. One of the strongest recent examples for anyone who likes quiet, sparse, observational cinema. For a viewer wanting incident, the film is almost entirely a child's point of view and daily detail.