I tend to favor horror movies even when I shouldn't, and this one definitely tested my mettle. The Silence is one of those unfortunate flicks that has the right recipe, tasty ingredients, a few shocks for spice, and ends up collapsing in the middle. It leaves you feeling hungry instead of satiated. It made me want to switch over to another, comparable, movie called A Quiet Place; I did not, because then I would have been even more distraught over the delay of its sequel.
But The Silence is remarkably similar to John Krasinski's 2018 major horror success story. It features a deaf girl and her family -- especially her father -- fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by monsters that hunt using heir sense of hearing. This movie is based on a Tim Lebbon novel from 2015, so I guess you could ask which came first; the more crucial point is that Krasinski's film feels more intentional, more polished, and less problematic than this one from John R. Leonetti.
After a nauseating bit of handheld nonsense in the prologue -- a spelunking team opens a cavern filled with the monsters -- we cut to a teenage girl named Ally and her family in Pennsylvania. Ally became deaf after a car accident that killed her paternal grandparents; she lives with her parents, maternal grandmother, younger brother, and dog. Apparently the monsters, called "vesps", are so numerous, fast, and deadly, that they are quickly devastating the eastern seaboard. The government declares a state of emergency and orders people to stay quiet and indoors; the media goes underground before anyone really knows what exactly the threat is. Ally and her family decide to head out of town and into the less populated, quieter country.
Of course, the vesps follow them for unknown reasons (are all the cities destroyed already, driving the predators to more rural areas?), and we finally see them shortly after the family attempts and fails to travel off-road, resulting in the death of their traveling friend "Uncle Glenn." The vesps -- small, bizarre mixes between a pterosaur and a xenomorph -- swarm overhead, attracted to the sound of the car wreck and the dog barking, and in what may be the film's most tense sequence, the family sacrifices their dog and escapes on foot.
This is about where my interest in the movie faltered, for multiple reasons. It's annoying to have a hearing actress, Kiernan Shipka, playing the deaf girl Ally; it's nearly unforgivable that Shipka seems bored and uninspired the entire time. The plot itself dully follows suit with the many post-apocalyptic / road / monster movies that have been released in recent years with almost nothing to show for it. Stanley Tucci and Miranda Otto are utterly wasted casting choices, as they play the parents and are given almost nothing to do. And then there's the bizarre finale, which introduces the Hushed, a cult of tongueless thugs obsessed with abducting Ally to procreate with her in the hopes that her deafness will save the human race. At least, that's the impression I got. There is not much by way of explanation, and the logic at this point has been thrown out the window. The climax devolves into a weird home invasion that mixes The Strangers with The Birds during a dark and stormy night, and thank goodness the movie was almost over.
I didn't hate the experience of watching this movie, and a few moments were genuinely chilling. Leonetti seemed to be trying to make things work by adding a few grisly scares and some surprisingly cruel violence. But when all you want to do is move on to another movie in the same genre, you can't help but feel disappointed and annoyed at what might have been. If A Quiet Place is temporarily out of the question, Bird Box would be a viable option.
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