The Quiet Girl

Director: Colm Bairéad (Ireland). Year of Release: 2022

1981, rural Ireland. We hear the voices of concerned relatives looking for a young girl who has disappeared. This is a very low level search party – she’s just gone out to lie in the long grass, but we immediately sense the tension between a family which wants to feel whole, and her sense of not really belonging. Eventually, she returns home and hides under a bed. As we view her under the bed, a woman’s legs walk past and we hear a voice moving her on.

Cáit is painfully introverted and still wets the bed. She finds it hard to make friends at school, where the other girls call her a “weirdo”. She is largely ignored by her family. She has much louder sisters, with another sibling on the way. Her mother is too busy keeping going, while her father spends money on alcohol which should be used to repay debt. Many reviews describe the living conditions as squalid, but it looks much more orderly than, say, my flat.

One day, dad tells Cáit to get into his car. He takes her to Eibhlin and Seán, distant cousins who run a farm which contains a lot more order than my flat. Cáit is to stay there until mum has her baby … at least. Dad is in such a rush to get back, possibly to his mistress, that he forgets to unpack the suitcase which his daughter put in the back of the car. Eibhlin and Seán dress their young charge in the clothes of a boy about her age, who no-one ever talks about.

Cáit adapts well to the new atmosphere, where she is the only child in the house. When Eibhlin brushes her hair, she looks content. She accompanies Einhlin and helps out with the chores on the farm. She looks particularly excited while drawing water from a dangerous looking well. Seán is at first very taciturn – almost as quiet as Cáit – but when he starts to leave biscuits for her on a table, a bond develops between them.

The Quiet Girl received almost unanimous 5 star reviews, with critics praising it for its “poignancy” and “contemplation”. This is one of those rare occasions where I can find virtually no journalist who didn’t like it. User reviews on IMDB were also almost unanimously equally complimentary. Both critics and “ordinary” cinema goers talk of a possible Oscar. Who could argue with this? Well, let me try and make a case for why it just didn’t work for me.

Many reviews emphasize that the film is “beautiful”. Well, different strokes for different folks, but I prefer a bit more chaos in my films. The film is deliberately uneventful which resulted in my mind perpetually wandering. I’m not asking for car chases or anything, but I would prefer it if something actually happened. For all the film’s laudable attempt to show us the feelings of an often ignored introvert, for me at least it didn’t carry any emotional depth. I just didn’t care.

Now I know that this is one of those films where “nothing happens although everything is happening”. This is a technique which can work very well in a novel or short story. The problem is that, watching nothing happen ion screen for a protracted period of time can become very boring. It’s the sort of film you’d like to send someone to see on your behalf, so they can report back and you can talk authoritatively about it. Just as long asyou don’t have to sit through it yourself

There is a case to be made that The Quiet Girl is an anti-Marvel film – while the Marvel multiverse is full of bustle and product placement, The Quiet Girl offers peaceful contemplation. But couldn’t we have a happy medium somewhere in between? It’s not exactly that nothing happens at all – the intervention of a local gossip means that we find out the mystery of the boy’s clothes, for example, but it was nothing that I could get myself worked up about.

Moreover, there may be something pernicious about The Quiet Girl. Although she dresses Cáit in a boy’s clothes, Eibhlin teaches her to do a household chores – showing her to be a “real” girl. There is an implicit message, both of family as a cure-all, and an implicit criticism of Cáit’s overwhelmed parents as being the cause of her problems through their neglect, their drinking, and their squalid house. If Eibhlin and Seán can bring up Cáit, why can’t her dissolute parents?

There is one scene in which this is made much more explicit. While Cáit is in bed, Eibhlin enters the room and whispers “If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house of strangers.” I think that this is supposed to be profound and show us Eibhlin’s essential goodness. But it all feels very self-satisfied to me. Cáit’s family is at fault not because of the poverty which they presumably did not choose, but because of their neglect of a cute little girl.

This is all just an assumption on my part. This is not a film which likes to preach. But it does seem to be detached from any sense of history. The novella on which The Quiet Girl is based is set in 1981. News of the hunger strikes in Long Kesh must have reached even the remotest part of Ireland. Yet we have no real sense in which year, or even which century this is taking place. This renders any social problems to be ultimately the responsibility – and the fault – of individuals.

Other interpretations are possible, and, as said, I am very much in a minority in this one. And maybe if I’d found the film a little less boring, I wouldn’t see it as being so preachy. Maybe I should have gazed at the beautiful landscapes. But it is exactly this ahistorical aspect – the concentration on nature rather than society – that makes it so difficult for me to relate. I know, this is almost certainly my problem, but I really just didn’t get it.