movie review
The Silence
Starring: Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka, Miranda Otto, Kyle Harrison Breitkopf, and John Corbett
Directed by: John R. Leonetti
Tagline: They're listening.
It would seem obvious that following a well-made, successful film mere months later by what appears to be a cheap knockoff is not the best of strategies, but clearly Hollywood didn’t get that memo.
Almost exactly a year after A Quiet Place arrived in cinemas, Netflix has unveiled The Silence, a movie that follows pretty much the same premise, albeit a lot more shoddily.
Just like the John Krasinski hit, John R. Leonetti’s thriller is set in a world which is under attack by creatures that hunt by sound and tells the tale of a family with a deaf teenage daughter trying to survive the apocalypse.
Stanley Tucci plays Hugh, the father of Ally (Kiernan Shipka), a teenage girl who lost her hearing in a car accident. Because of her deafness, her family – which also includes her mother Kelly (Miranda Otto), brother Jude (Kyle Harrison Breitkopf), and grandmother Lynn (Kate Trotter) – has learned sign language.
When a team of researchers inadvertently release blind winged animals that have evolved into dangerous predators that hunt by sound, the fate of the human populace hangs in the balance.
Hugh and his family, accompanied by his best friend Glenn (John Corbett), search for safety while trying to figure out how to stay alive, supposedly taking advantage of their knowledge of sign language to communicate in silence.
But here’s the thing: they all know sign language, yet they keep talking! They keep risking death by speaking out loud even though they shouldn’t have to. Which makes no sense.
Yes, this is just that kind of movie.
The evolutionary premise itself is interesting, and The Silence – unlike A Quiet Place and its thematic cousin Bird Box – does make an attempt to explain the creatures’ origin, but even that comes off as clumsy, with several questions remaining unanswered. What, for instance, had been the food source for this horde of overgrown bat-like monsters while they were trapped in the recesses of the cave? What animals did they manage to prey on in what appears to have been an isolated cave system? And how did they manage to multiply into such large numbers? It’s hard to make sense of it all.
Tucci appears to be trying to give a convincing performance, and Corbett is good in his supporting role. But the rest of the cast is far from stellar. Shipka, in particular, can’t communicate the gravity of the situation her character is stuck in, and the film’s decision to give Ally a teen romance sub-plot only makes things worse.
The film doesn’t give us any reasons to care about the characters or be invested in their story, plus their continued survival only mystifies given their inability to actually stay silent.
Based on Tim Lebbon’s 2015 novel which predated A Quiet Place by nearly three years, The Silence does nothing new, and basically comes off as a sub-par, lower-budget prequel to the 2018 movie starring Emily Blunt (who happens to be Tucci’s sister-in-law).
For the most part, the movie just goes through the usual, hackneyed ideas that have already been worn out by the post-apocalyptic genre. There are very few points in the film where the proceedings have any sort of intensity, and there are no points at all where there is any suspense. Even when it tries to do something horrifying or gut-wrenching, it fails to deliver the punch that a better movie would have been able to make.
The Silence doesn’t manage to captivate its audience like it should, and it certainly doesn’t bring anything new to its genre. But ultimately there is something it does achieve: it makes you appreciate A Quiet Place even more.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
- Sameen Amer
The Express Tribune Blog - 4th May, 2019 *
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