The Quiet

Following the accidental death of her deaf father, Dot, an orphaned teenager who is also deaf-mute, is sent to live in Meriden, Connecticut, with her upper-class godparents, Paul and Olivia Deer, and their teenage daughter, Nina. Dot and Nina had been friends in childhood, before Dot lost her hearing as a result of a medical condition. The aloof Nina resents Dot's presence in the home and insults her repeatedly. Meanwhile, Dot observes that Olivia, an unfulfilled interior designer who was close friends with Dot's mother, is an alcoholic with a prescription drug addiction. Late one night, while returning to her bedroom, Dot observes Paul raping Nina in her bedroom, unbeknownst to them. It becomes clear that Paul has been sexually abusing his daughter for years. At school, Dot is a social outcast, though Connor, a basketball player, takes an interest in her, much to the chagrin of Nina's abrasive friend, Michelle, who is pursuing him. One afternoon, Nina returns home early from cheerleading practice and overhears Dot playing Beethoven on the family's piano. When one of the strings breaks, Nina hears Dot swear loudly, before vocally harmonizing with the strings as she tunes them. Realizing Dot is neither deaf nor mute, Nina withholds her knowledge of this. At lunch the next day, acting under the guise that Dot cannot hear, Nina assays her by confessing her hatred of her father, and details her plan to murder him. That evening, Dot goes on a date with Connor, who is able to communicate with her by lip reading. Dot returns home to find Paul and Nina in bed together, and deliberately breaks a vase in the hallway, interrupting; Nina realizes the action signifies Dot's alliance with her. Later, Dot comforts Nina in her bedroom as she cries herself to sleep. The following night, after a basketball game, Connor confides numerous personal secrets to Dot, including his attention deficit disorder and his chronic masturbation. The two proceed to have sex in the school swimming pool. Meanwhile, Nina returns home from the game and is visited by Paul in her bedroom while she irons her cheerleading uniform. Mustering the courage to proceed with the murder, Nina tells him to close his eyes, and that she has a secret to show him; she proceeds to approach him with the hot iron to burn his face, but is interrupted when Dot returns home. Nina puts the iron down, and instead lies to her father that she is pregnant with his child and needs a thousand dollars for an abortion. He agrees to give Nina the money the next day. Nina and Dot prepare to attend the school's spring dance the following night. While getting ready, Nina tells Dot she is going to kill Paul that night and run away with the abortion money he is giving her. She explains that she will find work as a stripper, believing she can become famous "like Courtney Love." Before the girls depart for the dance, Paul confronts Nina after finding tampons in her purse, and accuses her of lying about the pregnancy. Meanwhile, Dot, who is playing "Moonlight Sonata" downstairs, hears the argument. The confrontation becomes violent, and eventually descends into a rape before Dot comes to Nina's defense, strangling Paul to death with a piano wire. Olivia, in a drug-induced stupor, stumbles upon the scene, unfazed by her husband's corpse, but amazed by the revelation that Dot can hear. Michelle arrives at the house to pick Nina and Dot up. The two quickly change their dresses, which are soaked in blood, and leave. At the dance, Dot reveals to Connor that she can hear and speak; angered by her deception, he storms away. Nina and Dot leave the dance, and walk to a riverbank in the woods, where they bury a backpack containing their blood-soaked clothing. Nina asks Dot why she pretended to be deaf-mute. Dot explains that, after her mother died during her childhood, she stopped speaking and began communicating only with sign language, as it made her feel closer to her father. When the girls return home, they find police cars at the house, and Olivia turning herself in for Paul's murder. Olivia apologizes to her daughter, and atones for having allowed Paul's sexual abuse of Nina go ignored. The following morning, Nina and Dot sit together and play piano, freed from their respective fathers. ==Cast==

Casting After appearing in The Girl Next Door, Cuthbert wanted to "not just ... play the hot girl in the movie, it kills me." She had just finished the House of Wax and "was ready to do something that was definitely more character-driven." originally to be titled Dot. though she initially found it difficult to connect with: "I had a healthy childhood. That was a conflict for me because I had nothing to draw on for this character. Everything about this character made no sense in some ways. Everything about me wanted to defend myself and stand up for myself, but I couldn't do that for the character because this is all she knows. It was challenging." Belle's role as Dot was a departure from previous roles and the film was released around the same time as two other indie films starring Belle, The Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Chumscrubber. Belle learned sign language and classical piano for the role, Filming The film was shot during September and October 2004 in Austin, Texas, Although the film is set in suburban Connecticut, A total of 36 University of Texas students worked on the film. MSNBC's Christy Lemire noted that "Every frame of The Quiet, with its overly styled blue-gray tint and hazy interiors, calls to mind 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction or Unfaithful." Metroactive saw that "the purplish blues (the color that seems to work best in HD) are deeply saturated for such a cost-effective medium, and the color is never milky or streaky. At times, Mullen and Babbit overdo the murk." IndieWire agreed, noting that the "use of smoke to mask the use of high-def video ... results in laughably inexplicable smoky interiors lit like a high school production of Les Miserables." SF Stations Mel Valentin argued that Babbit effectively exaggerated the limitations of the budget and using HD video: "the video artifacts, lighting, night-time shooting, and sparse sets end up creating an oneiric, fairy-tale quality that helps to balances out the undercurrent of violence that permeates the characters’ actions." The scene where Nina's father Paul attacks her was notably difficult to film, because Cuthbert was genuinely hurt by Donovan, who was "very method" during filming, and Babbit was caught between wanting to protect her and the need for Cuthbert "to go to a scary place." Cuthbert said that playing a victim was hard for her, and that "there were moments when I would go to the bathroom and bawl." ==Release==

Following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005, the film initially failed to find a distributor. It was released in cinemas by Sony Pictures Classics, first opening in seven theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on August 25, 2006. Home media The film was released on DVD on February 13, 2007, with special features including “Fetal Pig, Fetal Pig, Let Me In”, a featurette on the dissection scene, “On Location: Shooting in Austin”, “Sans Celluloid: The Quiet and the Digital Camera", a script development featurette, and cast selection. ==Reception==

Box office During its opening week of limited release in New York City and Los Angeles, the film earned $27,546. ultimately appearing on a total of 366 screens. Bruce Kirkland of Canoe concurred: "If the subject matter was not so damn depressing, this dialogue would be camp-style laughable." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times similarly noted that the film lacked the "go-for-broke lunacy that makes a flick like Wild Things a classic of its trashy kind and might have saved this film." In contrast, MTV called it "a powerful tale of seclusion, sexual abuse and sisterhood." Shawn Levy of The Oregonian also gave a favorable review, awarding it a B-rating and writing that "Babbit, with unnervingly beautiful compositions and sharp editing, lures you so skillfully into the film's awful revelations and sickening atmosphere, you feel rather like Dot: defenseless, alone, vulnerable." Tonal inconsistency was a point of contention among critics, including David Rooney of Variety, who found that the film "seems unsure whether to push for suburban-Gothic psychosexual excess or tongue-in-cheek malevolence... the film is derailed by its own silliness." while Andrew O'Hehir of Salon wrote that it is "a terrible example of what can happen when the wrong sets of talented people get together. It isn't convincing as talky psychological realism or as high-school satire or as ghoulish forbidden melodrama, although Belle and Cuthbert have their best and creepiest moments in that mode." Alternately, James Berardinelli of Reel Views praised the film for its depiction of familial sexual abuse victims, writing: "One strength of The Quiet is that it does not deal exploitatively with the incest/sexual abuse issue in its quest to generate tension. This is a grim subject, and Babbit gives it its due. Nina is obviously confused and damaged." The writing of the film's characters was a point of contention, with Metroactive noting that "The role [of Olivia, Nina's mother] is savagely underwritten, leaving [Edie] Falco dangling, motiveless, for much of the movie"; The Houston Chronicles Bruce Westbrook criticized the film for "utterly failing its characters." Jeff Vice of the Deseret News noted that the film had "an awful script that features some howlingly bad dialogue." Assessment of the acting of Cuthbert and Belle was often positive: Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times, though dismissive of the film overall, wrote that "Both Cuthbert and Belle are nimble, surprising actresses, and they manage to navigate the film’s increasingly ridiculous twists with their dignity intact." Gazelle Emami of The Daily Californian similarly conceded that, "Despite the plot's failings, Cuthbert does a convincing job in her role, exuding an outer shell so tough that when her inner, softer layers emerge, it's a natural change of character." Empire Movies agreed, commenting that "this is Elisha Cuthbert's best film performance to date. Cuthbert's Nina has the majority of the most graphic and disturbing dialogue in the film, especially during one particular lunchroom scene where the camera is close up on Cuthbert and Belle's faces." However, Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle dissented, arguing that "Cuthbert flounces around a lot but doesn't have the range to express Nina's feelings." Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe said of Belle that "on screen she's hollow. The film is already visually dead, and it dies a little more whenever she's alone in a scene, which is often." Themes and analysis Some critics recognized lesbian undertones to the relationship between Nina and Dot. Director Jamie Babbit commented in 2006 that she had largely been drawn to the screenplay because it exemplified the "suburban horror genre." ==See also==