I watched "The Silence" last night- starring Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, who played the cute young Sally Draper on "Mad Men" and is now 21 years old. This movie is best described as a modern updating of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", albeit with a different spin. In the movie cave researchers unintentionally release into the world prehistoric winged cave-dwelling creatures called Vesps, which are blind pterosaur like creatures that violently attack and kill all the researchers. The Vesps then stage an all out assault on humanity. Their violent attacks are triggered by sound, hence the name of the movie, as the survivors of this Armageddon are those who are best at staying quiet. The movie never explains how the cave-dwelling creatures seem to enjoy the sunshine and open air.
I felt it was overall just OK- average for the genre. I would have expected better from a film with Tucci and Shipka.
I saw a 2018 horror movie last night on Hulu which preceded, and is very similar to, the film "The Silence" on Netflix which I reviewed above. It is called "A Quiet Place." This film stars, and is written and directed by, John Krasinki of "The Office" and "Jack Ryan" TV Series, , who is married in real life to his co-star Emily Blunt. They play the parents of 3 young children who live a nomadic existence in a post-Apocalyptic world that is terrorized by monsters, similar to the bird like creatures in "The Silence", who are blind and attack their prey based on hearing them. Hence the name of the movie. The biggest difference between the 2 movies is that the monsters in "A Quiet Place" are creatures that walk on 2 legs and do not fly, and appear capable of running at speeds in excess of 70 miles per hour to chase their targeted prey. The movie does not make clear if these monsters are extraterrestrial, however, since they do not look like anything of this Earth and vaguely resemble a smaller 2 legged version of the "Alien" in the movie Alien, it is safe to presume that these creatures are alien in origin.
If the creatures detect any conversation or noise, they are activated to attack the source at very high speeds, and their prey is then devoured before there is even a millisecond to react to them. Defending against such attacks by large and agile monsters moving at such high speeds is impossible. Hence the characters in the movie, who survive, do so by shutting up and staying quiet, and communicating with hand signals, so as not to invite an attack.
There is a great scene in which Emily Blunt flees a monster that has gotten into her house and does not know where she is, as it cannot see her, but senses her because of noises within the house. Emily's character's instinct is to run down a staircase into a cellar that has special rooms designed to muffle sounds, but in running down the staircase, she steps on a nail that protrudes up by around 3 inches, and it penetrates her bare foot to the other side. Not only must she refrain from screaming, lest she alert the blind monster to her precise location, but she must dislodge the impaled foot from the nail. And we all know that this is going to be even more painful than being impaled (I once had a coworker do this myself after stepping on a nail sticking out of a 2 by 4 in a dumpster I had been asked to go in while working a construction job in college, and it was excruciatingly painful)). Blunt's acting in this scene is quite compelling and it is one of the more intense scenes in the movie.
Also ratcheting up the drama is that Blunt's character is pregnant and soon to give birth. We all know there is nothing noisier than a newborn baby, and they can't be shut up, so it is interesting and amusing to see what steps the characters in the film take to address this situation and keep the baby quiet once it is born.
I would rate this movie as slightly better than "The Silence." What I liked most about it is that the Krasinki character is motivated by a desire to determine the weakness of these monsters, and by the end of the movie, a weakness is in fact determined. This sets up the movie nicely for the sequel, which Krasinki expects to release in 2021.
