‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: Colm Bairead’s Irish Oscar Entry

deadline.com:

Why do we have children? Cait’s Mam and Da would be hard-pressed to answer that, with a house full of sour teenage daughters, a toddler barely walking, another baby about to land and not enough money to pay a day laborer to bring in the hay.

These are the kind of kids who go to school with no lunch. With The Quiet Girl, Ireland’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, we are apparently in the late 1960s.

As her family’s middle child, Cait (Catherine Clinch) has learned to be silently wary, lowering her eyes as she walks by the school bullies and fading into the back seat of her father’s car when he picks up his fancy woman in the middle of nowhere on a country road, snickering with her as they drive along with no one to see them.

No one who counts, that is. When Cait is sent to stay with her mother’s cousin Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley) on the far coast of Ireland for the summer, she wears her usual set expression of endurance; her dilapidated family has surely just found one more way to neglect her.