I recently met the Irish Consul General in Los Angeles. When I said I write movies, the first thing she asked was, “Have you seen The Quiet Girl?” Much to my shame I admitted that I hadn’t. Then, as a good descendant of the Irish diaspora, I scuttled home to watch it. If you don’t recall, it was Ireland’s 2022 Oscar entry for foreign language film (it’s mostly in Irish Gaelic). It’s also the highest grossing Irish-language film of all time.
The film is, like its main character, very quiet. It unfolds in the summer of 1981, when nine-year-old Cait is sent to live with her mother’s cousin to ease the family’s tight budget as they welcome yet another baby. Cait often wanders off by herself, much to her parents’ consternation. She just doesn’t fit in with her older, rowdy siblings. She’s an internal child, always observing and, one senses, trying to make sense of this world and how she might survive it.
The movie does a great job of bringing viewers into the fragility of her existence and well-being, which she is powerless to change. Like so many child characters, she can only react, not act. The story’s big narrative question doesn’t seem any more complicated than, “How will this kid muddle through to adulthood?”
After a while, I realized that while Cait is indeed the focus of the story, she’s not a protagonist in the classical sense, because the protagonist is typically the character who drives the plot forward with their choices and actions in pursuit of their goals.
Cait is in fact a catalyst for others. The characters who drive the plot forward are the adults who deal with problems and choices in ways we often don’t see on screen. The Quiet Girl is similar to Tár in that the structure is present, but obscured (please see our Tár analysis). In Tár, we don’t see major plot points on camera because they were not important to Lydia Tár herself—they are glossed over and we only see how Lydia reacts to them. In The Quiet Girl, we don’t see major plot points because Cait is not necessarily even aware of them.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Let’s look at The Quiet Girl through the seven-point story structure we use at PageCraft. Cait’s Ordinary World is the dire situation of her poor, unhappy, indifferent family. The Inciting Incident is another baby on the way, which pushes her mother to make arrangements with her cousin Eileen to take oddball Cait off her hands for the summer.
When Cait’s resentful deadbeat father drops her off with Eileen and her husband Sean at their tranquil, much more prosperous farm, that choice represents the Point of No Return for the adults in the story. Eileen and Sean will take in this child for awhile, and Cait’s parents are rid of her. Perhaps it will make things better. It’s clear that Eileen is all for it and Sean is maybe reluctantly going along with it. But we experience this all through Cait’s eyes so it feels subtle and remote.
At the Midpoint, Cait learns what we’ve seen hinted: that Sean and Eileen have lost their own son and while Sean dealt with it by shutting down, Eileen is overjoyed to have another child to surround with her love. Cait’s discovery pushes the would-be parents to a reckoning. This girl isn’t ours, how attached should we get? How much of our grief have we dealt with? We only met Eileen and Sean at the Point of No Return, so now we understand what their Ordinary World was at the start of the story: that of a newly childless couple grieving their loss, when the Inciting Incident (the possibility of taking Cait for the summer) came along to change that.
The summer comes to its natural conclusion. By this point we’re desperately hoping Cait gets to stay with this couple with whom she has come out of her shell and flourished. For the first time, Cait has come to understand herself as someone who has value in the world. The Low Point for all of them is that Eileen and Sean must bring Cait back home, where she’s indifferently welcomed. None of them want to part, but because of prescribed family roles, everyone feel powerless to change the situation. This is when we understand that Eileen’s Plan A, or Second Act Goal, was really to fill the hole in her heart with this child. For her the Low Point, or All Is Lost moment, is that Eileen’s plan worked, but because it did, Cait’s departure means that hole will be empty again and all the more painful. Again we see all this in the periphery, suggested through the lens of Cait’s experiences as her siblings scoff at her new clothes and her mother deals with the new baby.
In the Final Challenge, the re-heartbroken Eileen and Sean drive away. Their task now is to grieve and make their peace. Now, for the first time Cait truly drives the action, as she leaves the chaos and apathy of her family to run down the lane after them, as they pause to manually open a gate. Our hearts break as it looks like they will make it through without seeing her, but Sean turns at the last moment and she leaps into his arms, calling him Daddy. The film ends here, but the remainder of the Final Challenge is clear: to do whatever is necessary to forge this new family arrangement. That is hopefully just a logistical problem—the emotional journeys are complete. Cait has experienced self-worth and love for the first time, and Eileen and Sean are healing and joyous. The New Ordinary World, after the film ends, is the life we hope they enjoy together.
What is unusual and fascinating about The Quiet Girl is that for most of the story, Cait is merely an observer. How much can a nine-year old drive the story? The story structure is present in the actions and choices of the adults, but obscured through her child’s perspective, much the way Lydia Tár’s narcissism masked her story points. While the two films are organized around radically different characters and points of view, they share an oblique structure, driven by others more in control.
As we teach in our workshops, the seven point structure should be used less as a formula and more as a tool that can be applied flexibly and creatively. It’s up to you to decide how to bend your narrative structure to your story’s service.
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