A quiet film with a great deal of low-spoken power, “The Quiet Girl,” a work almost entirely in Irish with subtitles, is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award in the best international feature film category. Written and directed by Colm Bairead and based on the story “Foster” by Claire Keegan, the film tells the early 1980s-set tale of Cait (Catherine Clinch, making a stunning debut), a shy and mostly nonspeaking 9-year-old girl with several older sisters, a neglectful mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh), who is heavily pregnant, and a farmer father (Michael Patrick), who is surly, dissolute and a degenerate gambler.
Driving home from the pub with Cait, Dan picks up his mistress, who is walking alone along the road. A hungry Cait, who is a bed wetter and poor reader, steals some milk from a classmate only to have a brute knock it into her lap. The girl leads a lonely and drab existence until her mother sends her to live with her mother’s middle-aged cousin, Eibhlin Cinnsealach (Carrie Crowley), and her remote dairy farmer husband Sean (Andrew Bennett).
Eibhlin takes the girl under wing and shows her how to do chores around the house, how to run the vacuum cleaner. With Eibhlin and Sean, Cait becomes accustomed to a regular cycle of meals and baths and an evening hair-brushing ritual. When Cait wanders off while Sean tends to the barn where he milks his cows, the man becomes flustered. She just went off to look for a broom to help him.
