The Silence is the latest in what seems to be the latest craze of post-apocalyptic monster movies, following A Quiet Place and Bird Box, sharing many of the same plot elements of the former. What’s interesting is that while A Quiet Place was made first, The Silence was based off a novel written in 2015, well ahead of A Quiet Place. What’s not so interesting is how poorly this material is handled, as opposed to the other film.
The film follows a family led by patriarch Hugh Andrews (Stanley Tucci), whose daughter Ally (Kiernan Shipka) went deaf a few years prior. When an outbreak occurs that causes a species of blind creatures known as vesps to overtake the US, moving around based on sound, Hugh gets the family to pack up and head to the countryside where it’ll be quieter, while trying to avoid any further vest attacks while also gaining the attention of a religious cult.
Whereas A Quiet Place focused on a group of characters with a clear-cut plan, The Silence focuses on a group of characters who don't know where they're going or don't have any sort of plan until halfway through the movie. They only move because the plot requires it, not even thinking that taking the family dog will prove to be a problem, considering these are creatures that move based off sound, not even getting something that will keep the dog quiet.
This is the common, most frustrating element of The Silence, which is that the entire movie acts like A Quiet Place on autopilot. There’s rarely a sense of urgency or any actual suspense. For a movie that focuses on people being frightened for their lives, everyone just seems to move along without a care in the world, or the sense that their lives are at stake if they don’t act accordingly. While it seems the idea the movie was trying to convey was that the characters were trying to keep a level head in the midst of all this chaos, they just come across like it’s more of an average day rather than a potential world-ending crisis.
This isn’t helped by the fact that the acting is flat and monotone throughout this movie. Stanley Tucci, a normally very charismatic actor known for his quirky, energetic supporting roles, is unusually restrained here. He’s meant to be the strong-willed patriarch of the family, but rarely does he ever act like he’s actually concerned for his family’s safety. Instead he seems like he’s an instructor who didn’t want to go into work that day, and is rattling off rules to the rest of his class.
Kiernan Shipka, another normally talented actress, who really knew how to evoke a wide range of emotions when she was on Mad Men, is also surprisingly a letdown here. She’s meant to be strong-willed and level-headed, as seen in the film’s opening moments where a group of bullies try making fun of her because she’s deaf and she ignores them (she can read lips and knows what they’re saying). But she rarely seems to bat an eye when it comes to any impending danger, outside of one scene towards the middle of the movie involving her crawling through a tunnel.
Even the way in which the film handles her deafness is poorly defined. The notion that she can read lips - explained in the otherwise pointless introduction sequence involving the bullies - seems like a half-hearted excuse so that the film doesn’t always have to portray her as a realistic deaf person. There are more times than not where she’s seen having what seems to be a normal conversation with the rest of the characters, and will occasionally show her engaging in sign language with her family to serve as a reminder to everyone that she can’t actually hear them. It’s only sporadically mentioned throughout the film and is only brought up when the plot deems it necessary.
And the movie even breaks its own rules most of the time, as well. Whereas in A Quiet Place, the creatures could hear someone if they spoke nearly above a whisper, there are moments where characters talk slightly louder than that, and the film only sporadically chooses when it’s deemed loud enough that the vesps could hear them or not. Characters will carry on normal conversations, very nonchalant, like there’s not a potential world-ending crisis on their hands, and only from time to time will it be somewhat loud enough to be an issue.
This all just goes back to The Silence’s main problem, barely scratching the surface of any plot points they bring up and moving on so quick from them that it’s difficult to even care. The film tries introducing what’s meant to be a secondary antagonist to the vesps, with the reverend character. But he’s introduced only in the final act of the film, and even when he is introduced, the protagonists barely take him seriously, with ludicrous exchanges where the reverend writes what’s supposed to be creepy dialogue on a sheet of paper as a means of intimidating Hugh and Ally.
Had he been introduced much earlier on in the movie, it could have made for a very intriguing, sinister premise, but it instead comes and goes so quickly that it’s difficult to grasp how much of a threat he’s meant to be. And this all leads to easily one of the most anticlimactic conclusions of all-time. The movie doesn’t so much end, as it does just abruptly stops, with the feel like even the cast and crew had enough at this point and wants it all to just end. There’s a sense they barely even cared, so the fact that the audience wasted all their time to get to this point feels like an insult.
The only horror that’s really present in The Silence is the fact of how horrifyingly bad it is. It’s completely inconsistent, breaking its own rules most of the time and calling back on certain plot elements when the plot feels its necessary to do so. There’s almost never any suspense felt, and it seems like the actors didn’t even truly care, evidenced by their monotonous, distant performances. This is a knock-off version of A Quiet Place, with not even half the effort put in. The Silence is even more catastrophic than the world it’s describing.
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