The Silence Review

April 15, 2019 at 11:07pm
By Jason Stettner

The Silence is a Netflix Original film that features a world of quiet, a quiet place you could say perhaps. Moving past that, this is due to various ancient creatures that attack anything that makes noise. There are obviously millions of these creatures that have been randomly awakened and they eliminate everyone over night. This film really does seem like a series of random events.

It hits the requirements of what's needed for this type of survival movie and just skips along to each of them. There's no soul, no depth and really no sense of danger. It has no horror element aside from the first opening moments which were handled well. From there it just sort of goes along and is incredibly boring. The CGI doesn't look great and while it is gory at times, it's mostly just silly looking. I suppose the acting was alright, there wasn't much for anyone to do.

There weren't any dimensions to the characters aside from the lead Ally (Kiernan Shipka) being deaf due to some accident in the past. Even then, a sort of bland character and purely the main factor for the family being able to handle the silent transition. Despite the need for silence, they got away with talking and moving through some leaf covered grounds with little issue.

As mentioned prior, the events just sort of seem to happen. It's almost like fast paced glimpses at key moments during this type of situation. The ending felt incredibly rushed, to the point I had to check it twice to make sure I hadn't missed something. I certainly didn't watch it twice, I just backed up to look again. It just abruptly concluded with a brief speech. So odd.

To build on that note; it really doesn't spoil anything and even past that mention, you shouldn't watch this catastrophe. It was all over the place, most moments were brief and it didn't go anything exciting with the content. It's like they saw a similar horror type movie and thought they'd just hit essential points from it. There are monster scenes, random tragic segments brought on by awful CGI and a weird cult type group.

This movie is strange, very fast paced and while I appreciated the notion of getting to the end fast. Maybe some additional context would have helped out here. The side characters are largely useless and it's hilarious how things work out over the course of the movie.

The Conclusion

The Silence is a terrible movie that provides nothing interesting, it's boring and the characters are soulless. There's no value to this film and it's all over the place. The acting isn't anything special, even if it does have a fairly competent group that's largely headed by Stanley Tucci. It perhaps isn't their fault, not a whole lot to exactly work with here.

The plot was so generic, things just happened and events went by. It was like a summary of a more intense exploration into random creatures taking over. The whole ending was just bizarre and I felt it made no sense. The whole side character's connection and survival skills didn't make any sense either. Just an absolute mess of a film that I would have been better off never seeing.

The Silence Review at Home with Streamed Viewing
Content Access was Provided by Netflix

Rating Overall: 2.3