The Silence (2019)
The monster-horror genre has always had a complicated relationship with imitation. One film cracks open a fresh idea, audiences respond warmly, and within eighteen months the streaming platforms are loaded with films that smell very much like the original but have somehow lost everything that made it interesting. Released in 2019 and arriving on Netflix with remarkably little fanfare, The Silence belongs firmly to that tradition. Its premise places a family in a world overrun by blind, predatory creatures that hunt entirely by sound, forcing its characters to communicate in near-total silence in order to survive. The family's teenage daughter, Ally, happens to be deaf and so is already fluent in sign language, which positions her as the most naturally equipped member of the group to cope with the new rules of survival. The film draws on Tim Lebbon's 2015 novel of the same name, though the book predates John Krasinski's Shivers-adjacent wave of creature horror, which rather complicates the question of who owes what to whom. The finished product, however, does not exactly benefit from that context.
John R. Leonetti is a director whose career tells its own story. He built a solid reputation over many years as a cinematographer, working on films like The Mask and both Insidious pictures, before stepping into the director's chair with Annabelle in 2014, a film that was polished but unremarkable and succeeded largely on the strength of its parent franchise. The Silence is a co-production spread across Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Constantin Film among the studios involved, a company whose output ranges from respectable European arthouse work to the kind of loosely assembled genre product designed primarily to fill a catalogue slot. The film runs a brisk 91 minutes, which in theory ought to work in its favour, and yet it still manages to feel padded.
The cast is, on paper, considerably better than the material deserves. Stanley Tucci is one of those performers who rarely turns in a careless performance regardless of what surrounds him, and he leads the family unit with the kind of worn, determined warmth that has made him reliable screen company for three decades. Kiernan Shipka, already well established through Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, plays Ally with genuine effort, and Miranda Otto brings a quiet, grounded quality to the role of the mother that the script simply does not reward. John Corbett rounds out the principal cast in a supporting role that, like much of the film, promises more than it delivers. You could argue this is precisely the kind of ensemble that a low-budget genre piece needs to give itself any credibility at all. Whether they succeed is another matter entirely, and one rather better addressed by someone who has actually sat through the whole thing. If you are curious about other examples of big-name performers turning up in franchise blockbusters where the craft around them does not quite match their effort, it is worth having a look at what happened with Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) or the similarly chaotic Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), both of which raise comparable questions about talent adrift in troubled productions.
There is a special kind of cynicism reserved for streaming cash-grabs, but John R. Leonetti’s 2019 creature feature The Silence truly takes the biscuit. It is, without exaggeration, essentially a poor, straight-to-streaming tribute act to A Quiet Place. They even threw in a deaf child protagonist to really hammer the point home. Honestly, I found watching it to be exactly like someone being told to drink ten pints of beer and then try to write a script for John Krasinski’s hit movie. It’s a shameless, hollow imitation that completely misses the tension and emotional grounding that made the original work.
You’d think with a cast featuring the reliably brilliant Stanley Tucci, there might be a glimmer of quality to cling to. Fair play to Tucci, he tries his absolute best to inject some gravitas into the proceedings, playing the patriarch of the family on the run. But he is completely let down by a script that is just utter rubbish. The story is super predictable, marching through every expected survival beat without a single surprise, while the creature effects themselves are frankly not great. When your monsters look like they were rendered on a PlayStation 2, I felt the suspense evaporate pretty quickly.
What really pushes this picture over the edge from merely mediocre to a complete mess, however, is the baffling narrative choices. At one point, the family stumbles upon a fully formed, robe-wearing cult that has apparently sprung up to worship the monsters. The problem? The "invasion" only started a few days prior. The idea that a dedicated apocalyptic doomsday cult could organise, acquire matching outfits, and establish a compound in such a ridiculously short timeframe is just laughable. It’s a glaring plot hole that highlights just how little thought went into the actual world-building.
The Silence is a cynical, deeply flawed misfire that offers absolutely nothing new to the monster-horror genre. Leonetti has delivered a sluggish, unoriginal slog that relies entirely on the success of better films to justify its existence. It’s a frustrating watch that will leave you checking your phone long before the credits roll, making it a thoroughly dreadful experience.
The Silence sits in an awkward position in the recent history of the genre: arriving too late to be original, too thin to be a worthy riff on its influences, and too cautious to do anything genuinely strange with its own premise. Films that arrive in the slipstream of a hit can occasionally find something worthwhile to say, even from borrowed materials, but that requires a script with ideas of its own and a directorial sensibility willing to take a risk or two. Neither appears to be present here. For anyone interested in horror that actually commits to its own logic and earns its atmosphere, there is far more rewarding ground elsewhere on the site. Sometimes the best thing a film can teach you is precisely what it has failed to do. The Silence is, in that limited sense, educational.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-07-19
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Silence (2019) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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