In the 1970s, sneaker manufacturer Converse had entered dire financial straits. The company’s troubles were due in part to their iconic Chuck Taylor design being bastardized and mass-produced on the cheap by shady third parties, then sold to undercut the genuine article’s cost. The company’s solution was the Converse One sneaker, a new release boasting a design similar to that of the classic Chuck, but without the unmistakable logo and branding. Converse charged a lower price point than for their bestseller, and found that there was a surprising amount of money in the business of making your own knockoffs.
Netflix, the agile and continuously evolving beast that it is, has arrived at this same conclusion. The streaming giant’s executives fed the ubiquitous popularity of Bird Box along with their Chilling Adventures of Sabrina golden girl Kiernan Shipka into the all-powerful algorithm, and it regurgitated this low-rent imitator. The Silence exists for the sole purpose of being digitally sorted into a list of recommendations For Viewers Who Liked Bird Box, though that classification would be more accurately clocked as For Viewers Who Liked A Quiet Place. Come to think of it, the demographic they’re really after would be something closer to Viewers Who Have Trouble Telling Similar Things Apart.
This indistinct drop in the ocean of post-apocalyptic horror may have been cast and shot in 2017, but its presence on Netflix – a twist more compelling than anything in the film, the platform having acquired the distribution rights after a year of dust-gathering on Global Road Entertainment’s shelf, and released the film with two weeks’ notice – is a perceptible effort to piggyback on whatever seems to be working at the current moment. In a perfect world of cross-promotional synergy, the teens finishing up their binges of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s recently uploaded second season will see Shipka in something else (along with Miranda Otto, who portrays her Aunt Zelda), and ask zero questions before hitting play.
In this optimal scenario, they won’t research past the summary of “in a world where any noise means instant death, a deaf girl must lead her family to safety”. They won’t discover that the source of the violence raining from the skies is nothing more than irate mutant bats unleashed in a thudding prologue, and rendered with CGI crude enough to make a viewer wonder about budgetary constraints. They won’t watch the trailer, and notice both Shipka (who makes no visible effort to behave like a deaf person, much to the consternation of actual deaf actors) and her on-screen dad Stanley Tucci looking less “terrified” than “faintly confused about the choices that have brought him to this point in his life”. They won’t see the ramshackle production values passed off under the excuse of end-times wreckage. They won’t note the grey color-grading suffocating the daytime scenes and blotching the nighttime scenes into nothingness.
Even so, nobody but victims of the sunk-cost-time fallacy compulsively following this through to the end could predict the fresh dysfunctions branching off from the otherwise rigorously followed Bird Box model. Namely, that the film realizes that it needs a more present villain than the faceless beasties swarming the globe, and clumsily introduces a tongueless cult of evil zealots to menace our heroes. And on top of that, screenwriter Shane Van Dyke has forgotten to gin up a proper ending, forcing his script to simply stop rather than conclude.
There’s a watchable movie to be carved out of all this, one that embraces its intrinsic slumminess as a knockoff and pursues that ignominy out the other end to B-movie paradise. That’s Van Dyke’s bread and butter; the writer made a name for himself by cranking out cloned screenplays like Transmorphers: Fall of Man, Titanic II, and Paranormal Entity for lovably disreputable schlock factory The Asylum. In scant moments, such as the sudden camera swoops or the hilariously on-the-nose music cues intended to warn that danger is near, it looks like The Silence may be able to muster a sense of humor about itself. But dignity gets in the way every time this film starts to loosen up and let itself in on the joke. Netflix doesn’t want the aura of stink that emanates from the bottom-feeders at The Asylum, and tamps down the hokier elements that bring life to the remakesploitation sub-genre. When Shipka decides to video-chat her crush mid-cataclysm and he actually picks up, bloodied and pursued by hellions and still down to flirt, what could have been a wonderful comic set piece is played straight. This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it’s the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence.
The Silence is available now on Netflix
