Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'The Silence' (2019)

When I read the description on Netflix, my first impression was, "How the fuck did they not get sued?!" By reading the description alone, you know this is a blatant ripoff of A Quite Place. But you know what? That's okay. A Quiet Place had some issues that needed to be addressed, so if these assholes think they can do better, be my guest.But when the movie started, it became blatantly obvious that all of the problems with A Quiet Place were not being addressed and, in fact, they were layering on new problems.

The first was downright fucking offensive. You see, this critic took two semesters of American sign language (ASL) and right off the bat, they got everything fucking wrong. The ASL speaking individual doesn't reflect anything about the fucking community and from the looks of it, most of the signs are just flat out wrong. There's no facial expression, the hand movements are erratic, it's completely dependent on oralism (look it up), and there is no sense that the actress is believably hearing impaired. You know what? If you can't get your head around acting as a hearing impaired individual, fucking hire one!

For that alone, I want to tell this movie to go fuck itself. So you know why I forced myself to watch the whole thing? Because I wanted to know, rally know, how badly they fucked everything up. And it just starts with the disrespect to the ASL community. The movie fucking sucks too.So, while most of the acting is acceptable for horror, even quite good in some cases, because they fucked up the primary acting as bad as they did, I grade the acting worse than porno.

This movie was sackless. Every time it built up tension, it abandoned it with no fucking follow through. The atmosphere had nothing special to speak of like A Quiet Place. The CGI beasties were corny as fuck. It relied almost entirely on Deus Ex Machina to drag the plot kicking and screaming.

You know what? All of my fucking complaints are going to boil down to, "Go watch A Quiet Place." So, fuck this movie! Go watch A Quiet Place.

SPOILERS!!!

Strike one. The woman with the baby on the subway. If you're going to have a group of people feeding a mother and her baby to monsters, you have to really display the real brutality of the situation. When the baby started crying, one of two things should have happened. 1) They lynch the baby and kill it. 2) They physically throw the woman and the baby off of the subway. They had a moment for real horror there and they fucked it up.

Strike two. When the family makes a run for the open country, they start out with the youngest son in the SUV with the uncle and all the guns. There are SO many fucking places they could have gone with that. Could you imagine a scene where the uncle character is trapped in the SUV trying to get the kid to safety, while these little fuckers are eating him alive? But they just abandon it. Half way through the trip, the kid gets back in the car with his family.

Strike three. When they came across the place they'd inevitably wind up staying, there were several elements they pussied out on. The first is that the recluse who lived there could have been something they were forced to deal with. But nope, she just gets eaten right at her introduction. Second, if she's a psychotic recluse, how the fuck is it so easy to just sneak onto her property through a drain pipe? Wouldn't she lock that shit, just like the god damn 20 foot fence around her land? Finally, the wood chipper seemed super effective against these little fuckers. They were basically just throwing themselves into on mass... Why not just leave the fucking thing running all the damn time?

And it just gets worse from there. The deaf girl should have been forced to watch her boyfriend get eaten alive on live chat. But no, somehow, he miraculously survives. There was this confrontation against these religious zealots with minimal casualties. There was practically no conflict. They overtook superior numbers who basically got the drop on them and even made it seam easy.

But what this movie really failed to do was answer any of the glaring questions from A Quiet Place. How the fuck did these things overcome the military if they can be killed on mass with a wood-chipper? They're not practically bullet proof like the creatures from A Quiet Place. Yeah there's thousands of them, but that's not really an issue either. We have sonic weapons, and more than enough means to disrupt anything that works on echo location.

You know, that's another thing. Do these people not get how echo location works? Once these things positively identified any object that was edible, they should be able to reliably locate and eat anything else that matches the sonic pattern. They also had fucking noses, that they sniffed with. So they couldn't figure out what their food smelled like?

And that's another thing. The cave system they were trapped in is a limited amount of space. How the fuck were there enough of these things to wipe out four major cities in less than a day? I can see them becoming an issue if they can start spawning, but it could take fucking weeks for them to establish the numbers they had in two days.

Nice addition with the religious "end of days" zealots, but it doesn't make up for the fact that there isn't an original fucking thought in this whole damn movie. It's basically just Pitch Black, meets A Quiet Place, meets Bird Box.

In short, fuck this movie.