Delayed Reaction: The Silence

Premise: After escaping from a deep, dark cave, flying creatures attracted by sound attack the Earth.

 

I know. I know. I know. I understand that production cycles are a lot slower than most people think. This movie is based on a horror novel from 2015. It was filmed in Fall of 2017. I'm sure that they had no idea that A Quiet Place would come in 2018 and become a blockbuster and cultural touchstone. Even though The Silence came out a year after A Quiet Place, it was in no way made as an attempt to capitalize on that movie*. That said...It's really hard not to call this a knock off of A Quiet Place.

 

*Then again, Stanley Tucci is married to Emily Blunt's sister. There's no way the similarities didn't come up at Thanksgiving dinner at some point.

 

It doesn't help that everything about A Quiet Place is better. The Silence never captures the terror of making a sound, and that's the one thing this movie absolutely must do. Without that, it's just a generic action movie. I don't care if it's pulled from the book, Kiernan Shipka as a recently deaf girl is pretty awful. The fact that she speaks perfectly may be reflective of actual later-life deaf people, but in the movie it's a hard thing to square. She's deaf, just as an excuse for the family to all know sign language. However, she can speak without any volume modulation needed and knows how to read lips perfectly. Again, I don't know exactly how it works for actual deaf people. It all seems too easy and convenient for this movie though. A Quiet Place smartly side-stepped the problem by casting an actual deaf actress to play the daughter. Then Shipka is also the narrator? She has a little brother in The Silence. Why couldn't he be the deaf one? It still lets her know ASL, but there aren't all the questions about how fully verbal and not fully deaf she is throughout the movie.

 

This thing is a mess. Worst of all, it bungles the tension with sound so much that it's not really even a horror movie. It's a disaster movie at most. It's a sad waste of a pretty good cast. Like, I'll see just about anything if you tell me Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka are in it.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend