The Silence (2019) - Movie Review

When he was in the process of making A Quiet Place, director John Krasinski insisted on casting deaf actress Millicent Simmonds to play the role of a deaf person. Among other reasons, one of his main ones for doing so was, by having someone on-set who actually knew what it was like to live as a deaf person, he and by extension the production at large would gain a better understanding of it and how to portray it. As a result, Simmonds’ knowledge not only helped shape what the film would eventually become, but also helped highlight just how fucking brilliant her performance was all on its own. I bring all of this up because, if that production is an example of the right way to go about such things, The Silence is an example of the wrong way to do it.

Having defended films featuring hearing actors passing for deaf characters in the past, like with Kate Siegel in Hush, I don’t want to come across as too hypocritical on this one, but Kiernan Shipka’s performance here just doesn’t sit right. While not helped by the sound design, which only seems to understand deafness as a perpetual ringing in the ears (which makes certain scenes more painful to watch than they needed to be), she just doesn’t sell the artistic empathy needed to make her role work, weakly-written as it is. To help highlight the comparison here, director John R. Leonetti apparently thinks that just being able to use American Sign Language, on its own, is enough to show that she has "an almost innate sense of what it’s like being a deaf person". Can’t say I imagined much better from one of the most useless modern horror directors.

And on that same note, surprise, the horror isn’t all that good either. It banks a lot on jump scares (because Leonetti has learnt pretty much nothing from what happened with Wish Upon), and not particularly great jump scares at that, and the design of the resident creatures the Vesps. Said Vesps look like someone took a bat and squashed a Xenomorph’s head onto it, Sid from Toy Story style, and it really comes across like they could have just used bats as the main threat without losing anything in the transition. They’re also horrendously rendered, as if Mr. X only assigned their interns to animate these things because they are never able to properly integrate with the actual footage. Bad enough on its own, until you realise that that same level of non-fidelity applies to a rather painfully-realised car crash sequence that somehow looks even faker.

I could go for the easy route in terms of the writing and point out how co-writer Shane Van Dyke is largely known for penning mockbusters for The Asylum, somewhat adding to this film’s reputation as a Quiet Place cash-in, but that would be ignoring that he’s also the writer of Chernobyl Diaries, an aborted found footage film that fails at that genre about as well as this fails at sensory horror. Aside from the already-rubbish Vesps, there’s also a cult in town called The Hushed who… um… what are these guys doing here again? I mean, yeah, they’re tied into the main threat, much like the cult in Bird Box was, but they don’t even have an actual goal in place here. The closest we get is them referring to Shipka’s Ally as "fertile" and mildly terrorising her family, all without any kind of pay-off or even a modicum of sense behind it.

Just when I think John R. Leonetti’s current track record with horror films can’t possibly get any dumber, he delivers a film that feels like a watered-down slurry of other, trendier, better horror movies. The actors are definitely trying, and kudos to Shipka and Stanley Tucci for how strong their chemistry is, but they aren’t nearly enough to overcome how this feels like a mostly-collective effort to utterly fail at being scary or even entertaining.