The Quiet

The Quiet *

A young high school student, thick black hair, no makeup, walks down the hallway. She wishes that she were invisible, and whenever she is in a large crowd of people, she doesn't even feel like she is there. This is the first image of "The Quiet," quite possibly one of the most silly, dull, and very unlikely thriller which was is full of hated characters doing hateful things, not one of which I can even jusitfy. And I wouldn't want too. I really also have to question the road on which Camilla Belle is going down. She showed serious promise with "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," and now she is doing her perfectly fine acting in duds like this. And don't even get me started on "When a Stranger Calls." That was just embarassing. She really should start looking into a new agent, because she is simply too beautiful and too talented to go on like this.

"The Quiet" stars Belle as Dot, a deaf mute who is just trying to get through high school without being noticed. She does, like mentioned before, wish to be invisible, and to be left alone. In the lunchroom, she sits alone in a circle table in the center, apart from everyone. Not even the "freaks" want to hang around with her. Sometimes she'll talk to the lunch lady, who has a deaf child and can communicate through sign language. Dot's father recently died, and she showed up at the doorsteps of a family friend, Olivia and Paul, holding a bos with her father's ashes. She has no where else to go, and the two take her in without any hesitation. Olivia is in the middle of decorating the new house, so everything is really a mess. Dot's presence isn't alright in their daughter Nina's eyes, who continues to verbally abuse Dot. She takes advanatage of the fact that Dot can't hear or speak by saying bad things to her, in front of her face and behind. However, the entire family has secrets that they all decide to tell Dot, as a way to get things off their chest without telling anybody at all. Olivia pops pills, and Paul has been sexually molesting Nina for years. Nina tells all of this to Dot, including the fact that she plans on murdering her father. However, there is in deed something strange about Dot, and as she begins to be the confident of all these people, it turns out that she has secrets of her own.

The biggest problem with "The Quiet" is that it is really just a sloppy made thriller. It's written horribly, with dialouge that sounds as if its being read by movie characters and not actual people. It's directed by a television director who has a handful of episodes of "Gilmore Girls" and "Nip/Tuck" under her belt, and she tries to give every single scene a sort of style which doesn't contribute at all to the actual film's content. It's really just a pest. Maybe if she spent some time on characters and not on the look, it would have resulted in a better product. And then there's the script, which goes from point A to point B, and then onward to point C, D, E, F, and even G. There is no road to travel here, and it jumps from topic to topic, character to character, situation to situation, without any rhyme or reason. It because hard to watch sometimes, because I was being shifted so much to so many different things, many of which didn't even add on to the storyline. There is something about Camilla Belle, though. She really can act, and she really does show her stuff here, even though most of her preformance is silent. She takes a candle out of the "Little Miss Sunshine" book here. She tries to act invisible, and wants to be alone, but everybody keeps putting their affairs into her life.

"The Quiet" is very dark and depressing and dank. In fact, it's probably one of the darkest I've ever seen, which is usually a real hook for me. However, every character here is so damn messed up that they can't even be liked. I hated everyone, from the mother and the father, to Nina's best friends friend, someone who just has one or two lines. I can't even think of anyone to recommend this too. It's not exciting enough for a thriller lover, and not involving enough for a drama lover. It had no redeeming qualities, and is a train wreck all the way. I hated everybody in this film, and I hated every minute. There is a reason why this came out in the last week of Augest.