I was traveling and the ladies were busy on St. Patrick’s Day, so we still haven’t watched our annual standby, The Quiet Man with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Last night, however, we watch something new to us, a 1995 Irish film called The Secret of Roan Inish.

In 1995, I would have been halfway through my time at Yale, drinking too much Mountain Dew, studying to Soundgarden, and wasting braincells on “edgy” thrillers and crime movies. This movie passed unnoticed, but in recent years somehow crept back onto my radar. So this weekend, when the Sunday Funday jar yielded a slip of paper reading Dad’s Choice Movie, I knew where we were headed.

The movie tells the story of a family broken by two many separations, most recently, the death of a wife and mother and the mysterious loss of an infant son. Our heroine, Fiona, is a young girl making the best of the aftermath. Her older brothers work hard in the city; her father soaks his sorrows in the pub. Finally she is sent to live on the seashore with her grandparents and an assortment of extended relations, but even there, sorrow is near. Her grandfather mourns for the family homestead on Roan Inish, the Island of the Seals, whish is visible on a clear day just offshore. Her grandmother, who scorns the old man’s sentimentality and superstitions, mourns the missing baby: Fiona’s brother Jimmy, whose cradle was washed from the beach and out to sea in circumstances that seem supernatural.

Fiona is a lonely, but fearless, girl, who senses her family needs healing. She notices things, like a particularly sleek and curious seal that seems to greet her when she arrives on the coast, smoking embers in an abandoned cottage, and an omnipresent brown-winged gull that serves to draw her along in her adventure. She is old enough to learn as much from what the adults don’t say as she does from their words, and young enough to believe the stories she hears of selkies (mythological creatures who shift shape between seal and human) in the family tree and a little, naked boy who sails a tiny boat in the waves and inlets around Roan Inish.

The story is bittersweet and smart, childlike but not childish, otherworldly but not scary. All four of us (my bride, my middle-school daughter, my seminarian son, and I) loved it. Check it out!