In a Church Hall, like so many others in and around small-town America, a group of women meet to shoot the breeze and share some cakes. It’s a scene many will recognise from soap operas, Hallmark movies and daily life. Singleton Marjorie (Eleanore Pienta) is looking for a man. Leslie (Olivia Luccardi) is hoping to raise funds for the group by selling vintage clothes. Mom Kim’s (Dana Millican) car smells like feet. As the meeting begins, ringleader Emily (Stefanie Estes) unveils the table’s pastry centrepiece – a pie with a swastika baked into it.
The group breaks into nervous giggles. The first meeting of the Daughters for Aryan Unity is in session.
In this incendiary one-shot thriller, director Beth de Araújo puts the spotlight on the all-too recognisable racism of its characters. Each is distinct, but terrifyingly plausible, and realistically depicted. The Nazi punk. The resentful worker drone, flirting with racism. The blue-collar soccer mom. The middle class agitator. These women come from disparate backgrounds, but find a bond in their shared skin colour and hatred of the other.
Deftly observed interplay between the group gives way to something even nastier when the women venture from the Church Hall to Kim’s convenience store. There, an altercation between Emily and two young women (Cissy Ly and Melissa Paulo) boils over into very real violence. As the Daughters break into the sisters’ home, it continues to escalate until the actions playing out on screen become the reverse of the film’s own title. As a home invasion movie, it’s more Hate Crime than The Purge – loud, upsetting and genuinely difficult to watch. This is easily the most horrifying film of the year.
Some may question the choice to focus on the aggressors rather than the sisters and their lives, but that would be the point. The film’s single take (well, four, composited into one) gives its audience no respite from these horrific characters nor their hateful actions. Soft & Quiet is an angry, abrasive experience, with no interest in making its villains sympathetic or conflicted in their actions. This is not easy viewing, but nor is it supposed to be.
Soft & Quiet holds up a mirror to a growing chunk of white America… and then smashes that mirror over its audience’s head.
