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.
Faithfully based on Claire Keegan’s novella Foster, though unfolding in a mix of Irish and English, the film is literary and entirely cinematic in its sinister potential. The backstory of Cáit’s feckless father and eternally pregnant mother is pure Thomas Hardy, while the scenario of a child abandoned to strangers in the middle of nowhere is a knowing nod to gothic horror. In the event, its most brutal moment comes through a side swerve into comedy, when the officious neighbourhood gossip (Joan Sheehy) takes it upon herself to spill all the beans.
Otherwise, the jeopardy of the adult world is revealed to Catherine Clinch’s eternally vigilant Cáit through averted eyes, leading questions, or the strange unleashings of a card game or a funeral. She’s an innocent whose own silence is a mystery: her bedwetting hints at trauma, while the grace with which she initiates a relationship with Seán, by slipping into step with him as he sluices down his cowshed, hints at an intuitive wisdom.
Perhaps the true story, the film suggests, is not two adults rescuing a child, but a child bringing two adults back to life. For all their kindness and generosity, meals with Seán and Eibhlín are joyless affairs. Typically, the turning point is glimpsed through a half-open door, as Cáit watches them cosying up to each other over the washing up. It’s only a tiny gesture of affection, the touching of two heads at the kitchen sink, but it is also a moment of transformative magic.
