This week comes a trailer for the latest Netflix horror flick, The Silence. Before pressing play to watch this trailer, I was intrigued and hopeful, mostly due to the presence of Kiernan Shipka and Stanley Tucci. Having read my review of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, you would know just how much I enjoy Kiernan’s work, and Stanley Tucci is just a gem. So, did the trailer live up to my slight hopes? I mean… sort of.
There’s not much to say about what happens in the trailer itself—it’s just a standard horror movie trailer involving monsters and an apocalyptic setting. Out of what we do get, Kiernan Shipka looks just as good here as anything else she has been in, while the same can be said for Stanley Tucci. There is one thing that sets this film apart from any other generic monster horror: the premise. The Silence is a monster movie where you can’t make a sound. See, the monsters, they rely on sound to hunt their prey… wait, I seem to be remembering something. There’s already been two movies exactly like this released in the last year alone, and one of them was even on Netflix already!
A Quiet Place, Bird Box and now The Silence all revolve around the same premise: depriving their characters of a sense or ability to do something inherent to everyday life (like speaking) or else the monsters will get them. What is going on in Hollywood? Has all the creativity really vanished? I don’t know—but I have a theory. All the studios, once a year, send off their screenwriters to a writing retreat (imagine somewhere swanky up in the Hollywood Hills), and at this retreat they are usually given pieces of stimuli and told to write a story, but someone screwed up and everyone got the same stimulus which has, in turn, caused every screenwriter in Hollywood to write the same film all at once. Or… they could just be trying to cash in on the success of A Quiet Place. I like my theory better.
Overall, the trailer is fine. It’s just generic and the main problem I have with it is that it fails to differentiate itself from the other recent films with similar premises. Nothing other than its casting really screams “Look! Here we are going to take this idea and build on it!” Really, there isn’t much hope they are going to do anything new and different with it. Instead, the trailer just shows the same we have seen before, leaving The Silence looking like a simple generic rip-off of the films that have come before it. When the film lands, I may be wrong, but for now, the well of creativity seems to be running dry.
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