‘The Quiet Girl’ Channels the Uncanny Repose of a Danish Master

Are Colm Bairéad and Kate McCullough, respectively the director and cinematographer of “The Quiet Girl,” at all familiar with the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi? Straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, Hammershøi channeled Johannes Vermeer to achieve an art of uncanny repose, a realm in which domestic interiors were a poetic embodiment of the men and women who inhabited them.Mr. Bairéad and Ms. McCullough are nowhere near as severe as Hammershøi, but, boy, do they key into how architecture — its colors and textures, geometry and interstices — can amplify the temper of a story and its characters. “Amplify,” in this context, may be too strong a word. “The Quiet Girl” is a film of modest scope and deliberate rhythms, with a story whose complications are set out with uncommon patience. “If we look closely and openly at a small thing,” writes Mr. Bairéad, “we can see a great deal in it.”Mr. Bairéad adapted the screenplay from “Foster,” a novella by Claire Keegan originally published in the pages of the New Yorker. Cáit (Catherine Clinch in her film debut) is a nine-year-old girl born into a rural family on the lower end of the economic spectrum. She’s one of an indeterminate number of children — girls, mostly — whose Mam (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) is overburdened and whose Da (Michael Patric) is a deadbeat and a rake.Cáit tiptoes around her family — that is, when she’s not avoiding them altogether. The movie opens on an expanse of long grass in which the camera ultimately reveals Cáit hidden amongst its depths. School is a series of taunts and travails, reading is difficult and recess provides a sterling moment to jump the fence. Cáit is located and picked up by Da who promptly makes a pit-stop for a quick pint on the drive home.Whereupon Mam and Da talk about sending Cáit to distant relatives for the summer. We overhear this conversation along with Cáit and, in fact, the “The Quiet Girl” unfolds from her vantage point. What, then, does she make of her new caretakers Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and her husband, the taciturn Seán (Andrew Bennett)? They’re older than her parents and have a home that evinces a distinct level of comfort. Da remains his brutish self: after an awkward lunch with Eibhlín and Seán, he can’t get away quickly enough, hurriedly driving off with Cáit’s suitcase in tow.Seán is a dairy farmer with a significant patch of land at his disposal, going about his duties with a palpable sense of duty and nary a word spoken. Eibhlín is, if not effusive, then compassionate. She gives Cáit a warm bath, combs her hair, and locates clothes squirreled away in a closet that are a bit outsized and boyish in nature. Life lessons are doled out in haiku-like epigrams. “If there are secrets in a house,” Eibhlín tells Cáit, “there is shame in that house.”As it turns out, there are secrets and shame in the house. When a local woman offers to walk Cáit home from the wake for a neighbor, Eibhlín accepts the gesture, forgetting, I suppose, that Úna (Joan Sheehy) is a nosy parker with no filters and not an iota of self-awareness. Cáit is pelted with questions about Eibhlín’s baking practices — butter or margarine? — and then is told, in a manner as casual as it is brusque, about a tragedy that has shaped the lives of Eibhlín and Seán.“The Quiet Girl” is Mr. Bairéad’s first feature and though he skirts sentimentality, especially when he lets the camera dote too adamantly on Ms. Clinch, he holds true to the diffuse emotions that power the narrative. Louise Stanton and Emma Lowney, respectively costume and production designers, deserve special kudos for undergirding the picture’s abiding sense of restraint, and the cast is uniformly excellent, with a particular nod to the statuesque Ms. Crowley. “The Quiet Girl” is a gem, lovingly polished and no less moving because of it.

‘The Quiet Girl’ Channels the Uncanny Repose of a Danish Master

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