Review of The Quiet Girl / An Cailín Ciúin (2022), directed by Colm Bairéad

This was an impulse watch for me at my local AMC Theatres. I had never actually heard of The Quiet Girl until it was nominated for the Oscar for best International Feature Film, and when I saw that, I was vaguely intrigued, but still wasn’t compelled to watch it on my own.

But when I had my spring break and was sitting at home with nothing to do, I saw it was playing one day randomly at 1 PM. That’s my favorite time to watch movies: in the middle of the week when everyone else is working.

And so I booked a ticket to The Quiet Girl without having actually watched the trailer or read the synopsis. I just vaguely knew it was an Irish-language movie. That’s how I ended up the movies on a Tuesday surrounded by very elderly people—that’s the interesting demographic that came out to my screening.

I was the only one under the age of sixty-five, much like my experience when I saw Belfast awhile ago when in theaters.

Onwards with the review!

Cait, a nine-year-old, is sent away by her parents to live with distant relatives.

Our protagonist in The Quiet Girl is Cait; she many siblings crammed into one house, and by the sense of how they’re depicted her family is either working class or poor. In the opening scenes of the movie, we see how Cait is very very quiet to the point where it seems a bit abnormal—and the people around her make it seem like it is this way.

Her sisters make fun of her with their friends and think she is strange, and there’s an incident at school. Cait moves a drink onto her desk while in class, and a girl bumps into the desk, spilling it all over Cait, making it look like she peed herself.

When she moves through the halls of the school, everyone just kind of stares at her like she’s a show, and her sisters and their friends make fun of her.

Cait’s parents make the executive decision to send her away after that. Her mother is pregnant with yet another child, and they see Cait as the problematic kid despite the fact she never says anything to them.

Her father loads her into the car one day and drives for hours, dropping her off at her mother’s cousin’s home. Cait is going to live there for the summer, but when her father, who clearly does not care much for her, leaves, he ends up leaving her suitcase in the car with him. Thus she doesn’t have any clothes or belongings.

Eibhlín and her husband Seán are the ones taking care of Cait during this time. Eibhlín treats Cait like her own child, and immediately upon arrival we see how Cait opens up to the older woman.

Over the course of the movie, her relationship with Eibhlín quickly progresses where it seems like she is more of a mother to Cait than anyone else, and her husband, Seán, might be more gruff and standoffish in the beginning, but he quickly warms up to Cait too.

After yelling at her for wandering off one day, he slips her a sweet to eat.

The film is marked by different events, although they have a tendency to blur together in the name of bonding these three as a family unit, and digging deeper into what’s actually going on behind the scenes.The first sign of turmoil in this idyllic life of the couple shows up when Seán brings Cait onto the farm one day—when she wanders off, he begins to panic.

When a neighbor’s father dies, and Cait is brought to the wake, we learn from an overzealous neighbor that the couple used to have a son. One day, when no one was looking, the dog led him to the slurry, where he drowned.

When Cait did not have clothes originally, she was given the dead son’s. The room she is staying in, too, is his.

This marks an emotional shift, as it shows how Cait has been brought into the fold of their world. But the summer must come to an end, and Cait’s mother summons for her to return home after giving birth. School is about to start, too, so Cait can’t get out of it.

The couple leaves Cait alone briefly in the house, and she tries to make herself useful by grabbing water from the well. Here is a fake out, as one might assume she’s going to fall in and drown like their son, but she drags herself out and Eibhlín finds her wandering home. Although she survived, she does get sick.

Then it is time to return Cait to her home. They make the long drive out, and almost immediately the couple notices the off atmosphere in Cait’s family’s home. No one is really excited to see her home, and her father, a drunk, acts in his stand off way as usual.

When the couple drives away, Cait, using the running skills she trained for all summer with Seán, sprints down the dirt driveway and jumps into a hug with him. When she sees her angry father following after her while crying, the movie ends with her saying, “Daddy.”

Whether it’s a warning or an acknowledgement of seeing Seán as a father is ambiguous to me.

Overall Thoughts

Like it’s name, The Quiet Girl is a fairly quiet movie. There’s a lot of gorgeous imagery and dialogue scattered throughout, but if one is not into slow movies, they’re going to have a difficult time trying to get through this one.

I think if it was any longer, it would have not worked as a movie due to the sheer nature of its subject. It focuses on Cait and how she learns about the couple and their lives before she arrived, as well as realizing she can be loved for who she is, and if it were to turn more outwards, it simply would not have worked.

I haven’t really seen Irish movies before this, so it was fascinating to watch and pick out aspects of the language I recognized from my knowledge of linguistics.

All in all, I would recommend seeing this if you haven’t already!

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