NETFLIX ORIGINAL / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: JOHN R LEONETTI / SCREENPLAY: CAREY VAN DYKE, SHANE VAN DYKE / STARRING: STANLEY TUCCI, MIRANDA OTTO, KIERNAN SHIPKA, JOHN CORBETT, KATE TROTTER / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
A young deaf girl and her family struggle to survive in a world ravaged by marauding carnivorous predators that hunt by sound. Yes, A Quiet Place was one of the best films of 2018 and inevitable comparisons with The Silence, based on the terrific and terrifying book by Tim Lebbon (which preceded John Krasinski’s chiller by several years) will sadly do John R Leonetti’s brisk, shorthand adaptation few favours. But if you’re willing to overlook the inarguable similarities you’ll find a lot to enjoy, although fans of the book are likely to be frustrated by budget-dictated abbreviations and alterations.
A group of cavers in the Appalachian mountains uncover a chamber containing a previously-unknown species of vicious bat-like creature (which become known as ‘Vesps’) which attack and kill the cavers before swarming out into the open air and heading to the nearest cities, attracted by noise. 16 year-old Ally (Shipka), who lost her hearing in a car accident a few years earlier, lives with her parents Hugh (Tucci) and Kelly (Otto) along with her maternal grandmother Lynn (Trotter), her younger brother Jude and their pet dog (don’t get too attached to him). Ally is woken in the night by her mother when reports break that cities across the US are being devastated by swarms of Vesps which are slaughtering everyone on sight as they sweep across the country. Reasoning that abandoning the city might be a good idea Ally and her family (plus her father’s best friend Glenn Corbett) set out in convoy to find safety in the rather less hectic and noisy countryside.
Needless to say, things don’t quite go according to plan. They do, however, go largely in line with Lebbon’s breath-taking novel… to a degree. The Silence does its best to evoke the spirit of the book – several set pieces, especially the sequence in which Ally and her family are besieged in their car and attacked by screeching Vesps, come off quite well – but the film never really manages to capture the scale of the disaster and carnage wreaked by the creatures. In the book they are described as great clouds of death filling the sky; here we tend to see a few little CGI dots drifting around in the background and when we see them close-up – they’re nicely-realised and look suitably vicious – they’re not really in sufficient numbers to make them the inescapable, lethal threat they really should be. The film’s brief running time – just ninety minutes – means that several of the book’s themes are horribly truncated. The family finds safe haven in a farmhouse but quickly clash with the members of a cult of silence known as ‘The Hushed’ who will stop at nothing to kidnap Ally for vague reasons to do with fertility. Sadly the last half-hour or so of the film doesn’t quite work; we’re asked to believe that The Hushed has risen up virtually overnight and the slow creeping build-up of the book is inevitably sacrificed as the film dashes to the finishing line/end credits with some vague hope for survival for the family and for humanity (the Vesps are susceptible to cold, so the survivors are heading up towards the Arctic Circle – they really should have just headed for Wales).
For all its faults though, The Silence isn’t a bad film, and it does its best within its narrative framework. But this is a story which could have worked much better as a limited series (preferably set in the UK of the novel) where it could have spent more time developing the characters and their relationships; properly establishing the scope and scale of the devastation unleashed by the Vesps (in the book it’s worldwide, but here is resolutely US-centred). Still, if nothing else, maybe the movie should encourage a few more people to seek out a genuinely page-turning and propulsive novel and that, in itself, is no bad thing.
