The Silence (2019)

The Silence opens with a mining crew unearthing something winged and hungry, and closes with a teenage girl firing arrows in Alaska. Between those points, a family drives, walks, hides, and occasionally screams. The creatures hunt by sound, so the film's tension depends on silence, a mechanic already worked over the year before by a more expensive production with better staging. This one arrives on Netflix after a modest theatrical run in seven countries, carrying a critical consensus best summarized as polite exhaustion.

The protagonist is a deaf teenager, Ally, and the film folds American Sign Language into its survival logic with some care. The casting does the arguing for it. Kiernan Shipka, who hears, took the role and learned portions of ASL, and the director volunteered that she seemed to possess an innate sense of deaf experience. Deaf performers, including Nyle DiMarco and Marlee Matlin, disagreed in public and in detail. The result is a film that gestures toward disability representation while handing the part to someone outside the community, a choice that generates more discourse than the screenplay manages on its own.

Elsewhere the cultural ledger is thin. A cult called The Hushed cuts out tongues, declares Ally fertile, and intends to use her as a sex slave for repopulation, which positions patriarchal ownership of women's bodies as the monster of the third act. This plays as horror villainy, not thesis. The mining accident that releases the creatures carries no environmental argument. There is no economic critique, no racial commentary, no body-positive messaging, no queer presence, and no sermonizing. The film is a brisk, derivative survival exercise adapted from a 2015 novel, and it wants nothing more than to be watched quietly.