
There is plenty to critique about Netflix’s newest horror offering The Silence, but please don’t resort to calling it a rip-off of A Quiet Place.
Mostly because that would be an incorrect piece of criticism to throw their way, because the book on which the movie is based, the 2015 horror novel of the same name by Tim Lebbon, was published long before A Quiet Place started playing at the cinema.
There’s also a whole lot wrong with this sub-standard horror flick that has nothing to do with plagiarism, but we’ll get to all that in just a moment.
At first glance, The Silence looks like a highly promising movie, mostly due to the fact that it features a crazy talented cast in Kiernan Shipka, Stanley Tucci, Miranda Otto and John Corbett. But it quickly becomes very clear that the budget for this movie was pretty much dished out into star-studded salaries when it was desperately needed in scripting and story development.
Take a look at the trailer for The Silence.
In The Silence, Kiernan Shipka stars as Ally Andrews, a 16-year-old teenage girl who lost her hearing at 13 and monotonously narrates the opening scenes of the film by saying “everyone has their story of how it happened, this is our story.”
The trouble all starts when a research team descend into a cave and accidentally unleash an unknown species of vicious bat-like creatures known as “Vesps”.
The Vesps swarm across the US and quickly start infesting cities, including the one where Ally, her parents Hugh (Stanley Tucci) and Kelly (Miranda Otto), her grandmother Lynn (Kate Trotter) and her little brother Jude (Kyle Harrison Breitkopf), all live.
Now free from their cave prison, the Vesps decide that the best use of their time is to murder the entire human race by ripping the flesh from their bones while they all scream in agony. After video footage of a mum cowering in her car and holding up a sign that reads ‘don’t make noise’, with her toddler’s mouth covered in tape, goes viral, people soon realise that the creatures are blind and attracted to sound.
Ally and her family decide that staying in the city would be a very poor life choice, as all the sounds are sure to attract the creatures to them, so they jump in their car and attempt to find safety in isolation, which doesn’t exactly go to plan.