The Quiet Girl: Small Things Like These, by David Bax

The Quiet Girl definitely sounds like it’s the title of an airport paperback destined to be turned into a forgettable movie or, more likely, a forgettable prestige television miniseries. Ooh, why’s she so quiet? What’s she got to hide? But the feature narrative debut from Irish documentarian Colm Bairéad is no mystery. The girl in question is quiet mostly because she’s shy. But what unfolds over the course of this aching, intimate and profound drama proves to be more gripping than any knock-off thriller page-turner.

It’s Cáit (Catherine Clinch) who’s so quiet, easily overlooked by the rest of her large, economically downtrodden family in early 1980s rural Ireland. That’s why, when we first meet her, the adults in her life are given a kind of Peanuts treatment, usually obscured or out of focus. The neglected Cáit’s life is an almost entirely interior one. That fact only begins to change gradually when she’s sent to live with distant family–a childless older couple in another town, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Sean (Andrew Bennett)–while her mother tends to a newborn.

Characters switch naturally, fluidly between the English and Irish languages. This is, one assumes, natural to the way of life of people in this time and place but, never having been to Ireland myself–and not even having been alive in 1981–I can’t say for sure. Allegorically, though it does fit the situation in which Cáit finds herself, living between two worlds. In one, she’s alone amongst a gaggle of children. In the other, she’s the only child but is showered with attention and compassion.

Of course, no situation can be all perfect. I said before that The Quiet Girl was not a mystery but there are, in fact, secrets. Or one major secret, at least, that is revealed about halfway through and which first turns the relationship between Cáit and her newfound foster parents on its head before ultimately deepening it.

Bairéad and the incredibly gifted director of photography Kate McCullough (the Normal People miniseries) shoot in a classical, boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio. This full aperture, no bullshit approach is not an unexpected one for someone whose background is in documentary. But The Quiet Girl is not aridly naturalistic. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it benefits from a surplus of nature. The sunlight, the rustling of grass, the din of insects all feel like they’ve been turned up almost to the point of distortion. The film’s beauty is nearly overwhelming.

But there’s a reason we have–and probably not just in the English language–phrases like “too good to be true.” No matter how much Cáit, or even you the viewer who has likely come to love her as Eibhlín and Sean do, want this summer to last forever, it will end, as they all do. The Quiet Girl is a heartbreaking tale but the rare snatches of beauty we sometimes encounter in this world are worth all of the heartbreak and then some.