Sent to stay with distant relatives in rural Ireland, nine-year-old Cáit brings love back into their weary lives – though this gentle story has sinister depths
Colm Bairéad’s stunning directorial debut, about a nine-year-old girl fostered out to distant relatives for a summer by parents unable to cope, deserves to be as much of a classic as the 19th-century novel that becomes young Cáit’s bedtime reading, Heidi. In place of goats in the Alps, Bairéad and cinematographer Kate McCullough give us a dairy farm in the lush landscape of County Waterford, where the gruff Seán (Andrew Bennett) tends his cows, while the desperate-to-please Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) teaches her to cook and fetch water from a well of unknown depth.
This apparently gentle story has its own murky depths: the bottle-fed calves that Cáit learns to feed have been removed from their mothers; the room where she sleeps and the clothes she wears belong to a past that is kept secret from her and from us, even though it is signalled in the very first of the film’s sly half-reveals by her ne’er-do-well father (Michael Patric), as he grudgingly drops her off in his beaten-up car.
