FILM OF THE WEEK: A Quiet Love

There is a quiet confidence to A Quiet Love, Garry Keane’s warm, carefully observed documentary about three Deaf Irish couples. Rather than framing Deafness as struggle or spectacle, Keane takes a more matter-of-fact approach. He builds the film from conversations at kitchen tables, long relationships viewed in hindsight, and the practical decisions that shape ordinary lives. The cumulative effect is informative and deeply affecting, resulting in a film that feels grounded in reality and utterly uplifting.

The structure is simple: three couples, three intertwined stories, each dealing with questions about communication, family and belonging in a world designed for hearing people. Keane moves between them without fuss, allowing parallels to surface naturally.

The longest and most historically textured strand follows John and Agnes Carberry, who have been together for 66 years. They first met as children at Jordanstown School for the Deaf in Northern Ireland during the worst years of the Troubles. Their backgrounds could hardly have been more emblematic of the divide outside the school gates. John grew up Catholic on the Falls Road and lost his hearing after meningitis. Agnes was raised Protestant in a Baptist family with several deaf and hard of hearing siblings.

As a child, John was sent to Dublin to learn Irish Sign Language in a school for the Deaf in Cabra. When John moved back to Belfast at age 12, he found himself at a loss with peers and teachers who all used British Sign Language. Luckily his school crush Agnes helped him adjust, teaching him BSL, easing him into the social life of the school - and immediately becoming his sweetheart. The film treats their BSL lessons not only as a sweetly romantic flourish, but as the practical foundation of their relationship: two people, building communication and transcending borders and boundaries – a story given all the more emotion and weight given the surrounding context. These two children would never have met or fallen in love were it not for Jordanstown, one of the only schools where Catholic and Protestant students mixed. Following a brief separation after they finished school, they reunited and were determined to be together – not easy in a city of violence, barricades and suspicion.

John and Agnes’ story enlightens aspects of the Deaf experience that aren’t often acknowledged. During the Troubles, travelling across neighbourhoods was dangerous. For Deaf people there was the added vulnerability of not being able to hear warnings, gunfire, or approaching threats. John recalls nearly walking into crossfire because he couldn’t hear it. Agnes worked opposite the Europa hotel and only realised a bomb had gone off because the window behind her shattered, covering her hair in glass. Meeting each other required planning, nerve, and the constant navigation of danger. There was also the fear that their families wouldn't support the relationship.

Keane supplements their interviews with dramatised recreations sequences, casting younger actors to recreate childhood crushes, school days and early dates. Shot in soft focus with a slightly hazy, period feel, these scenes give visual shape to a relationship that stretches back more than half a century. The technique could feel gimmicky, but instead blends smoothly with the present day footage, reinforcing the sense of time passing.

If John and Agnes provide the historical backbone, the other couples bring the film into more contemporary debates within the Deaf community.

Couple Kathy and Michelle, now living in England, talk frankly about building a family as a same sex couple at a time when Ireland offered little legal or social support. Their journey through IVF becomes one of the film’s most emotionally direct sections, charting the medical stress, financial strain and sheer persistence required to have children. When their daughters are born, one hearing and one Deaf, a new set of questions emerges. How will the family navigate two different sensory worlds under one roof? Should they consider cochlear implants, a technology that remains controversial within Deaf culture? Their conversations are thoughtful rather than polemical, shaped by love and uncertainty rather than ideology.

The third strand follows Seán, a boxing enthusiast in Dublin who already has a cochlear implant. His story introduces a different kind of dilemma. To pursue a professional licence, he needs an MRI scan that his implant prevents him from having. The choice is stark: remove the device and lose the limited hearing he relies on, or abandon a sporting ambition that has given him direction after a troubled past. Supported by his hearing partner Deyanna and their young child, Seán’s sections carry a restless, forward-looking energy that contrasts with the settled domesticity of the older couples. Where John and Agnes reflect on decades together, Seán is still deciding what shape his future might take.

Across all three stories, Keane shows a consistent sensitivity to how Deaf people actually communicate. Interviews are framed to include both partners, so the camera catches the exchange of glances and reactions as much as the signing itself. The visual nature of these conversations becomes part of the drama. Watching someone listen with their eyes can be more revealing than any spoken line. Even the subtitles are handled with care. Rather than remaining fixed at the bottom of the screen, they appear in different parts of the frame and fade in and out, sometimes closer to the signer. It is a subtle but noticeable choice that introduces a small degree of effort for the audience. You have to focus. That extra attention mirrors the concentration involved in cross language communication, though it may prove slightly tricky for some viewers at first.

There is nothing flashy about A Quiet Love, and that is largely its strength. Keane, whose earlier work dealt with harsher geopolitical realities, keeps the tone here steady and humane. The film trusts that these lives, described plainly and observed with care, are compelling enough on their own. By the end, they are. What lingers is not a single grand message but a fuller sense of the variety, resilience and everyday complexity within the Deaf community, seen through three relationships that feel specific, unsentimental and entirely real.

Directed by Garry Keane. In cinemas now. 

• Watch the trailer below: