Letterboxd — Your life in film

I'm a little embarrassed, to be honest. I went into Turning Red assuming I wouldn't really connect on a personal level, that I would simply enjoy engaging in more general and universal themes in a gorgeously animated film that would hopefully be cute and funny and enjoyable. 

And then I spent a nominal chunk of time crying throughout it. 

What Domee Shi brings to the table for her first feature outing works on multiple levels. For those who dealt with…

The Quiet Girl is, appropriately, a quiet film. It lulls the viewer into its hazy, warm rhythm. Eibhlín brushing Cáit's hair in front of the bedroom window, the sun streaming in, yellow like the dress Eibhlín and Seán buy her. Eibhlín counts to one hundred, and you can almost feel the soothing shiver of a comb's teeth, a relaxing scalp massage. The slow, unfurling of hunched shoulders and progressive relaxing of the body, feeling safe enough to sleep soundly and…

True to its title, The Quiet Girl is a film built upon the values of the minute. Colm Bairéad's recounting of an introverted Irish child's summer, uprooted from her neglectful environment into one whose gentility betrays her expectations, is, plainly speaking, a simple story told through simple means. Consequently, Bairéad's guidance is so straightforward that The Quiet Girl's simplicity translates into an inevitable predictability; fittingly, though, the emotional resonance that courses through the film is one whose own simplicity lives…

“You don’t have to say anything. Remember that. Many people lost the chance to not say anything, and lost a lot because of it.”

The Quiet Girl subtly snuck up on me and absolutely melted my heart with its empathetic look at those struggling to move forward along the emotionally treacherous journey of grief and trauma. A confident debut from Colm Bairead with some exquisite cinematography and an emotive score. It's often been said that wounded people wound people. This…

The Quiet Girl is such an empathetic and delicate movie. It's shot with an intimate camera, yet often manages to feel far away from the characters. We observe their situation without intruding upon them. Told through the eyes of a young girl, the story unfolds gradually, as she begins to understand her world. Initially she struggles, feeling unloved, but finally love and care arrive. The economic and domestic tensions within The Quiet Girl are shown through her experiences, as a…

The Quiet Girl is a poignant, thought-provoking, accomplished work from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad. Written by Bairéad, it's a mesmerising feature that intertwines a marvellously beautiful story that calls to mind the earliest work of Lynne Ramsay, particularly her first feature, Ratcatcher. The quiet girl is nine-year-old Cáit, brought to life by an incredibly fragile performance from Catherine Clinch. She is shunned at school and dealt with indifferently by her pregnant mother, and her father is a man who…

The 2022 Catchup Project

As I watched The Quiet Girl and saw Catherine Clinch's extraordinary debut performance, I found myself wondering if there was a specific reason why we seem to get more outstanding child acting displays these days.

I think the more boring answer to that question is that the teaching of acting to kids is just better than it used to be. A more forward thinking answer might be to suggest that more filmmakers are telling stories about…

The war in Eastern Ukraine does not need to be seen to be felt. The aftermath is destructive enough to make visible the ongoing war left offscreen, where what we do see brings us into a shelter for children who've been either neglected or abandoned as the war rages outside. Their country has been crippled, their cities have been bombed, and their parents have turned to alcohol to deal with war-related PTSD and other fragile hardships. "Life has always been…