Overview
A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.
Humanity has been largely erased by an invasion of blind aliens who hunt their prey with their hearing. This means Silence is Survival. We follow a family trying to do just that.
John Krasinski plays husband Lee, and his real-life wife Emily Blunt plays his wife Evelyn. Their eldest child, Regan, is deaf (played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds), which means the family can use sign language to stay silent as they communicate. Of course raising a young family in silence will still prove impossible, and they find themselves in the middle of an alien hunting ground…
The script is pretty lean and the direction by John Krasinski is very tight. As one might expect with this premise, there is a lot of silence in the movie, and the acting is done largely by facial expressions and body language, which works very well in building the story and the tension. The acting is excellent and the bodily means of expression always feels genuine from the three leads (the younger kids have a bit less to add in the acting stakes).
Are there plot holes? Not really, but one could certainly question some of the choices the characters make, they are only human after all, but to me this didn’t distract from the experience in the slightest. In a taut 90 minutes, there is a whole lot to enjoy.
★★★★☆
