The Quiet Girl

It’s remarkable to think Colm Bairéad's gentle, heartbreaking, mostly Irish-language debut is just that, a first feature film, so utterly assured is it in every department.

Cáit is the the quiet girl of the title, sent away from her overcrowded, dysfunctional family home (Mum is far too busy looking after her new baby; Dad only seems to be around when the pub isn’t open) to stay with a distant relative (of her mother) and her taciturn husband, in a rural Ireland of the 1980s. Naturally, Cáit feels abandoned, but slowly, surely, warms to her new guardians and the possibilities they present, as she stirs in them some memories long repressed… Beautifully filmed in a manner that makes the most of the almost magical surroundings, and wonderfully evocative – part-remembered glimpses of sunlight through trees; a child’s-eye view from a car – of childhood in a rural summer. A delightful film.