★
When the world is under attack from creatures who hunt their human prey by sound, a teenager who lost her hearing at 13, and her family seek safety in a remote refuge.
Classification: 15
A drab and meandering knock off of A Quiet Place, The Silence utilises terrible clichés and tedious pacing to a deliver an un-engaging survival horror film that never delivers on any level of tension or horror. Despite leading stars Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, the characters are poorly written and their arcs are basic apocalypse horror tropes. Mild-mannered to survival badasses, traces of The Walking Dead littered throughout except the film barely does any legwork to have the audience care about these characters or their journey.
One of the main issues is the pacing, the filmmakers do very little to make the situation tense or engaging. You’ve seen stories like this before and done far better, comparisons to A Quiet Place are glaringly obvious with creatures that attack upon hearing a sound and the main child character being deaf. But whereas other films would create an interesting mystery over the events that have lead to this disaster, The Silence just throws its cards down almost immediately and then slogs its way to the ending as slow as it can.
Horror and tension would be this film’s main strength since the story and characters are lacking but even in that department that falls flat on their face. The “monsters” are a swarm of blind dinosaur birds that attack upon hearing any sound and never does this lead to any decent scares. The digital effects used for the creatures are never enough to fully immerse them in the world and to make the audience buy into the threat. This lack of belief only adds on to tedious runtime of the film; the monsters aren’t scary, the characters aren’t interesting, there is nothing to latch onto and care about.
Eventually, the monsters are discarded as The Silence tries its hand at “people are the real monsters” narrative that has been adopted by apocalypse horror and that will have you wishing for more CGI dinosaur birds. Uninspired at every turn, it feels like the film is following a checklist of scenes the filmmakers saw in other films and television shows of the same genre. Nothing from director John R. Leonetti shows any sense of originality or passion in telling this story and that blandness is reflected in almost every front of the film. The Silence doesn’t bother to try to be its own thing and that’s what leaves it dead in the water.
Overall, the film doesn’t have a strong narrative arc to latch on to, this journey of a family trying to find safety from killer dinosaur birds is unable to engage with its audience. It feels as if director John R. Leonetti wants us to put the work into caring about the characters just from basic empathy. “The characters are in danger, that’s enough right?” No, not really technically everyone in this world is in danger, so why is it important that we care about these characters safety? The Silence never asks or answers that question, it just hopes cliches and cheap monsters will be enough to make this entertaining and it never does.
Director: #JohnRLeonetti
Released: April 10th 2019
Available to stream on Netflix.
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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