THE SILENCE (Germany/US - 2019) Directed by John R. Leonetti. Written by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke. Cast: Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka, Miranda Otto, John Corbett, Kate Trotter, Kyle Breitkopf, Dempsey Bryk, Billy MacLellan, Chris Whitby, Barbara Gordon, Sarah Abbott, Kate Corbett. (Unrated, 90 mins) THE SILENCE is based on a 2015 novel by British horror/fantasy author Tim Lebbon, but that still won't stop the comparisons to last year's hit A QUIET PLACE. Filmed in 2017 and originally set to be released by the financially-strapped Golden Road before they sold it to Netflix, THE SILENCE was in production around the same time as A QUIET PLACE, and it's also interesting to note that SILENCE star Stanley Tucci is married to the older sister of A QUIET PLACE star Emily Blunt, so they had to know they had a family competition going with oddly similar horror movies about creatures who hunt by sound, with the action centering on a family that learns to exist in silence and can communicate by sign language since one of the children is deaf. Lebbon's novel is adapted by the writing team of Carey and Shane Van Dyke, the grandsons of Dick Van Dyke and best known for scripting various Asylum "mockbusters" like TRANSMORPHERS, STREET RACER, and THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED. The director is certified hack John R. Leonetti, a veteran cinematographer whose filmmaking credits include such classics as MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 2, ANNABELLE, and WISH UPON.
With that pedigree, THE SILENCE lives down to its expectations despite an intriguing set-up. Researchers are exploring an uncharted cave system 1000 feet below the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania when they're attacked by a horde of prehistoric, bat-like creatures that have been living and evolving in those sealed-off caverns for millions of years. The creatures are named "Vesps" by the scientific community. They're blind and hunt by sound, which means the hustling and bustling major cities are the first to be attacked and wiped out, followed quickly by the suburban and rural communities. The Andrews family--dad Hugh (Tucci), mom Kelly (Miranda Otto), teenage daughter Ally (Kiernan Shipka), younger son Jude (Kyle Breitkopf), Kelly's mother Lynn (Kate Trotter), and the family dog, along with Hugh's best friend Glenn (John Corbett), decide to get out of suburban New Jersey and head to the country where it's quiet. They're in two vehicles--Glenn and Jude in one and everyone else in the other--and they have an inherent advantage when it comes to keeping quiet: three years earlier, Ally lost her hearing in a car accident that killed Hugh's parents, prompting the whole family and Glenn to learn sign language. It isn't long before survivalist-type Glenn's impromptu shortcut leads to disaster when his SUV rolls off the road avoiding some deer. Jude already switched vehicles during a stop, and Hugh is unable to get a pinned and injured Glenn out of the wreckage. With the Vesps approaching, Glenn decides to fire his gun to attract them, sacrificing himself while the family takes refuge in their minivan. Any chance the dog will start barking uncontrollably?
Trapped in the minivan might've been a good way to sustain the tension, but it isn't long before they take their chances and hoof it in total silence, happening on a farmhouse whose owner instantly runs outside, firing her gun and screaming "Get off my property!" which of course, instantly gets her attacked and devoured by a flock of Vesps. That's the kind of insultingly lazy writing that just shows utter contempt for the audience, with the filmmakers taking the easiest possible route to get the family in the safe confines of an isolated rural home. That's followed by an immediate burst of genius as Hugh turns on a loud wood chipper, causing a ton of blind Vesps to fly into it and get instantly shredded. Why doesn't he just leave the wood chipper running and kill them all? Because there'd be no movie and more importantly, no inane third act home invasion curve ball, where a creepy reverend (Billy MacLellan) and his flock show up at the house, all of them with their tongues cut out to ensure silence and the reverend demanding Hugh hand over Ally, holding a handwritten sign that says "The girl is fertile." I can't speak for Lebbon's novel, but the Vesps have been out of their cave for seriously like, two days by the film's timeline. 48 hours into a national emergency and this clearance bin Immortan Joe and his crazed cult have already severed their own tongues and are out there stalking families and trying to abduct fertile underage girls? The milk in their fridge hasn't even expired yet.
There are a couple of intriguing elements that aren't really explored, like just how quickly everyone turns on one another when the shit hits the fan (watch a bunch of New Yorkers trapped in the subway kick a woman and her crying baby off the train to get eaten by the Vesps), and the Vesps using the carcasses of their victims--human and animal--as incubators for their eggs. More of that ickiness would've given this some appropriately apocalyptic and generally unsettling cred. Or just give me a whole movie of Stanley Tucci shredding blind prehistoric dinosaur bats in a wood chipper and I--and no doubt The Tucci Gang--would be totally onboard with it. But this is seriously just cheap-looking, SyFy-level junk. The Tooch is one of our most reliable character actors (and an Oscar nominee for THE LOVELY BONES), and he's an accomplished screenwriter as well (BIG NIGHT). Surely, he read the script for THE SILENCE and could see that it was hot garbage. Did he need to make a down payment on a new house? A kid starting college the next fall? He classes it up as best he can, and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER's Shipka (currently starring with Otto on Netflix's CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA) turns in an appealing and very credible performance, even taking the time to learn ASL in preparation, which is really going above and beyond for something this dumb.
THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (US/Canada - 2017) Written and directed by Osgood Perkins. Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, Lauren Holly, Greg Ellwand, Elena Krausz, Heather Tod Mitchell, Peter James Haworth, Emma Holzer. (R, 94 mins) Filmed in early 2015 and screened at that year's Toronto Film Festival under its original title FEBRUARY, THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER has been held up in distribution limbo by A24, who bounced it all over the release schedule from late 2015 and throughout 2016 before pushing it to spring 2017, where it's now bowed on VOD and received a limited theatrical run. While BLACKCOAT gathered dust on the shelf, debuting writer/director Osgood Perkins (son of legendary PSYCHO star Anthony) made another film, the Netflix Original slow-burner I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, which ended up being released first. PRETTY THING remains a love-hate proposition: moving at roughly the speed of plate tectonics, it's the absolute slowest of the crop of post-Ti West slow-burner fright flicks over the last several years, and while I appreciated what Perkins was going for, its almost experimental austerity set a land-speed record for going from intriguing to off-putting. Watching BLACKCOAT does enhance PRETTY THING to an extent, but what's odd is that though he made it first, BLACKCOAT feels like the kind of polished and assured sophomore effort of a young director who's gained significant confidence after getting the experience of a flawed debut under their belt. That's not to say PRETTY THING is a step back per se, but it's a step somewhere, a detour in an unexpected direction. There's enough similarities and thematic and stylistic overlap that the films could easily be examined as flip sides of the same coin, but it's PRETTY THING that, in retrospect, ends up coming across like the not-quite-there-yet test run for THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER. They're unquestionably the work of the same filmmaker but watching them in the order of release rather than the order they were produced actually seems like the more naturally progressive flow.
That doesn't mean THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER is a multiplex-ready commercial horror flick for the mainstream masses. It's only slight less slow-going than PRETTY THING, but with more characters and more story, so it doesn't have quite the "still life with narration" aura that's a natural byproduct of a movie with essentially two characters with one who's senile and pretty much catatonic. BLACKCOAT is also the most unsettling example of supernatural horror that the genre has offered since THE WITCH from a year ago, which could explain why shared distributor A24 might've wanted some distance between the two. Like PRETTY THING, BLACKCOAT's central characters are female and there are two stories (that element is more pronounced here) that eventually coalesce. At Bramford, an isolated Catholic girls school in upstate New York, the students are leaving for winter break at the end of February. Naive freshman Kat's (MAD MEN's Kiernan Shipka) parents are supposed to pick her up but are nowhere to be found. Older, cynical Rose (Lucy Boynton) deliberately told her parents to pick her up on the wrong day later in the week so she can deal with an unwanted pregnancy. They're the only two girls left at school, and headmaster Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) tells them to stay out of trouble and check in with two prim, proper custodians, Ms. Prescott (Elena Krausz) and Ms. Drake (Heather Tod Mitchell) if they need anything, but otherwise, Rose is instructed to keep an eye on the younger Kat. Rose puts Kat through a bit of a hazing ritual, telling her a creepy fictional story of a girl who was killed on the school grounds when she discovered the Bramford nuns were part of a cult of devil worshipers. Rose sneaks out and spends the evening with her boyfriend but returns to find Kat trance-like in the basement, kneeling before the boiler, an event Kat writes off as sleepwalking.
In the first of what becomes a series of cutaways to a separate storyline, Joan (Emma Roberts) is a young woman who gets off a bus several towns away. She's wearing a hospital bracelet that she quickly removes. Seeing Joan walking along the road, kindly Bill (James Remar) and his cold, stand-offish wife Linda (Lauren Holly), pull over and offer her a ride. She tells them she's going to Portsmith, which is the town right after their destination--Bramford--where they're going to pick their daughter up at school for winter break. While Linda wants nothing to do with Joan, Bill tells her that they've been tested and they find God in the little things that happen--"the little coincidences"--and that she reminds him of someone he knew a long time ago. Meanwhile, back at Bramford, Kat believes her parents are dead and are never coming to get her. Her behavior grows increasingly erratic, with a concerned Rose asking if there's anything she can do. "No," Kat replies. "You had your chance."
It's hard to discuss THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER's story any further without spoiling it or divulging too much information about exactly how these two seemingly unrelated plot threads come together. Perkins cleverly misdirects you into thinking one thing, but it's all a distraction from what he's really setting up (it's the kind of film where you immediately want to watch it again to see how you were tricked and manipulated). Aside from one well-crafted jump scare where the staging has a striking similarity to the staircase murder of private eye Arbogast in PSYCHO (an affectionate nod to the filmmaker's father), Perkins is more concerned with establishing a mood, slowly and methodically tightening the screws and ratcheting up the tension with a lot of help from a persistently droning, rumbling, ambient score by his brother Elvis Perkins, whose haunting "Blackcoat's Daughter" lullaby will chill you and make your hair stand on end. All of this, in conjunction with the slow pace, makes the sense of dread and doom not just unsettling but downright suffocating. Joan, Kat, and Rose are extremely well-rounded and thoroughly fleshed-out characters whose arcs go in completely the opposite direction than you expect as you get to know them after their initial intros: mean girl Rose ends up being the most sympathetic, especially after completely underestimating Kat, who's not the naive innocent she seems. And Joan...well, you'll just have to see.
Perkins has constructed THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER in such a way that everything you think you know is up-ended with each shift from Kat & Rose back to Joan, Bill & Linda. Each revelation ends up altering your perspective on everything that happened in the early stages. There's some terrifying moments here and with rare exception, they're the kind that sneak up on you, unease turning to discomfort before escalating to anxiety and terror. THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER will rattle even the most jaded, seen-it-all horror fan (one character picking up a phone to hear a gurgling voice ordering "Kill all the cunts" is particularly unnerving). Like a lot of genre fans, I'm old enough and I've seen enough over the last 40 years that, aside from an occasional WITCH, BABADOOK, or IT FOLLOWS to cite just three recent examples, it's hard to be surprised in a big way by new horror films anymore. But when this got firing on all cylinders and the pieces began falling into place, it was really getting under my skin and by its emotional end, left me shaken in a way that I haven't experienced with a horror movie in a long time. Possibly the scariest film to take place at a girls school since Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA, THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER is that most welcome of surprises--a disturbing, stomach-in-knots fright flick that quietly burrows its way into your head and will fuck you up for days after seeing it. Well done, Perkins. Your dad would be proud.
