The Silence is what happens when someone watches A Quiet Place, reads a Wikipedia summary of Bird Box, remembers they have the Netflix number for Stanley Tucci, and says, “Yeah, that’s probably enough.”
It’s a post-apocalyptic horror film about sound-hunting monsters, a deaf teenager, religious cults, and the end of the world—and yet somehow the scariest thing on screen is the script.
Vesps: Dollar-Store Demogorgons With Wi-Fi
We open in a cave, where a team of researchers use heavy machinery and shout constantly, which is exactly how every “ancient evil is disturbed” scene begins. They unleash the vesps: blind, bat/pterosaur/CGI things that hunt by sound and look like someone fed concept art for The Descent and Jurassic Park III into a blender.
These creatures:
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Swarm the world in about five minutes
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Hunt anything that makes noise
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Lay eggs in corpses like budget xenomorphs
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Are apparently defeated by… weather
It’s never not funny that humanity is wiped out by things that can be countered by:
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Moving north
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Owning a coat
Still, fine. Monsters gotta monst. The problem is less the concept and more that the movie is allergic to tension. The vesps go from “holy hell massacre” to “mild background nuisance” depending on what the scene needs. Make a tiny sound: instant death. Turn on an entire woodchipper and stand five feet from it: cinematic immunity.
Meet the Andrews: Extreme Survival, Mild Personality
Our chosen survivors are the Andrews family, and if you’ve ever wanted to see Stanley Tucci pretend a Home Depot skillset is character development, this is your moment.
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Hugh (Tucci): Dad. Drives. Holds flashlights. Makes Decisions™. Has the emotional range of “mildly concerned” to “slightly more concerned.”
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Kelly (Miranda Otto): Mom. Ideal for gasping softly and getting injured at narratively convenient times.
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Ally (Kiernan Shipka): Deaf teenager and emotional anchor, except the film treats her deafness like a quirky superpower rather than, you know, something that might actually alter the way the story unfolds.
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Jude: Little brother, primary function: almost die.
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Grandma Lynn: Sick, coughing, therefore fated to be a heroic distraction. The only thing louder than her lungs is the foreshadowing.
Also there’s a dog named Otis, who you will immediately recognize as “the pet in a horror movie,” which is code for “start grieving now.”
The movie really wants Ally’s deafness to feel crucial. And in theory, it could be: she and her family already know sign language, already communicate silently, already adapted. That’s a great hook!
In practice, it mostly amounts to a few subtitles and scenes where people sign while also whispering out loud because the movie doesn’t trust you to read and watch. Ally’s supposed to be the one with unique experience surviving in silence. Instead, she mostly scrolls the apocalypse on her phone like the world’s bleakest TikTok session.
The Road Trip to Nowhere
Once the news breaks that the world is being shredded by sound-sensitive winged piranhas, the Andrews decide to head to the countryside, where it’s quieter and the plot can encounter more fences.
They’re joined by Hugh’s best friend Glenn (John Corbett), a man whose entire arc is:
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Have guns
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Crash car
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Heroically sacrifice self
On the way, we get:
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A random attempted carjacking
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A massive traffic jam where apparently no one thought, “Hey, maybe stop honking?”
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Glenn yeeting himself off the narrative cliff into martyrdom
Then comes one of the movie’s most unintentionally funny bits: the dog. Otis starts barking at the vesps, because that’s what dogs do when shrieking death-bats attack. Hugh, knowing the sound will get them all killed, is forced to… dramatically let the dog out of the car to die off screen.
No attempt to muzzle him. No sedative. Just: “Well, we’ve exhausted every option except basic problem-solving.” You can practically feel the script saying: We have no idea how to keep this dog alive for the third act, get rid of him.
The House, the Woodchipper, and the Laws of Sound
The family finds a house with a big fence and a homeowner who, unlike everyone else on Earth, hasn’t heard about the sound-hunting murder flocks. She comes outside talking at full volume and is immediately eaten, because the film occasionally remembers its own premise.
The Andrews sneak in through a storm drain, fight off a few vesps, and then Hugh turns on a woodchipper to create a distraction. This is, by far, the loudest sound anyone has made since the apocalypse began. Vesps fling themselves into it like feathery lemmings, which is a fun visual… but also a complete betrayal of the earlier rules. That amount of sound should be drawing millions of them. Instead, the scene plays like a slapstick pest-control ad.
Kelly gets bitten on the leg during all this, and it briefly flirts with the idea that the vesps might have poison or some cool secondary effect. Nope. Just an excuse for a pharmacy run.
Apocalypse? Better Check Instagram
While sheltering, Ally immediately logs back onto the internet, which is apparently still running smoothly through a global mass extinction. She trades messages with her boyfriend Rob, who informs her his parents are dead but his Wi-Fi is thriving. Together they doomscroll news about:
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The spread of vesps
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The existence of “refuges” in the cold north
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The emergence of weird religious cults, because in apocalypse bingo you always have to cover “deranged faith group”
The best part is that this is all presented like extremely normal online behavior. “Hey, sorry your mom got eaten. Wanna meet up in Canada later?”
Cults, Fertility, and Zero Chill
Speaking of cults, we eventually meet The Reverend (Billy MacLellan) and his army of people who’ve cut out their tongues. They show up at the pharmacy, stare ominously, and radiate “we definitely drink something from a mason jar” energy.
Their grand plan? Kidnap Ally for her fertility.
Yes, in the middle of a movie about sound-sensitive murder bats, we suddenly pivot into “handmaid by way of Hot Topic.” There’s a whole undercooked subplot about them wanting her because she’s “special,” as if women with wombs are in short supply in a world that fell apart like five minutes ago.
They strap ringing phones to a little girl, use her as a walking noise bomb to infiltrate the family’s house at night, and set off all the alarms. The vesps come swarming, Grandma Lynn sacrifices herself by screaming (a rare moment that actually almost works), and the family kills everyone in a blur of confusion and flailing.
The cult is such a potentially interesting complication, but the movie uses them like a side quest in a video game: you walk into their area, things get weird, you grab some loot (trauma, bodies), and move on.
The Cold Fixes Everything (Except the Writing)
In a brisk little time jump, we cut to “weeks later,” where the family has successfully trekked north to a forest refuge teeming with people in flannel and dramatic lighting. Somehow they’ve avoided starvation, hypothermia, infection, and basic realism.
The vesps hate the cold—but don’t worry, we’re reassured they might adapt. Meanwhile, the humans are adapting too: hunting with bows, moving quietly, becoming more like Ally.
It could have been a neat thematic circle. Instead, it plays like someone tacked on a hopeful montage so Netflix viewers wouldn’t wander off feeling too bleak. Rob shows up (still alive, still online, apparently) and he and Ally go vesp-hunting with arrows, looking like a YA dystopian spinoff no one greenlit.
Ally’s final voiceover muses whether humans or vesps will adapt faster. My money’s on the CGI sky pterodactyls, because they’ve already survived more logical inconsistencies than any organism should.
Final Diagnosis: Needs More Silence, Less Everything Else
The Silence isn’t offensively bad; it’s just aggressively mediocre in a way that somehow feels worse. It has:
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A terrific cast, all doing their best “staring into middle distance” work
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A solid core premise that’s already proven effective in other films
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A potentially compelling protagonist in Ally, whose deafness could have changed the whole shape of the narrative
And then it does almost nothing interesting with any of that.
The sound-based threat is inconsistent, the emotional beats are recycled, and the cult subplot feels like it wandered in from a different, edgier movie and then got told to sit in the corner. You can see flashes of what it could have been—leaner, meaner, more focused on disability and adaptation—but the finished product is just… noise.
Ironically, for a film called The Silence, the best thing you can do with it is turn the volume down and put something else on.
