Line #24 Film/TheSilence2019


1	[[quoteright:220:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_silence_2019_film_poster.png]]
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3	''The Silence'' is a 2019 Creator/{{Netflix}} original horror movie adapted from a 2015 novel of the same name by Creator/TimLebbon. Its premise is that a spelunking expedition in Pennsylvania accidentally releases a tremendous swarm of monsters resembling eyeless crosses between bats and pterosaurs, later named vesps, that hunt exclusively by sound, which swiftly overrun a large portion of the North American continent.
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5	The movie itself follows the deaf 16-year-old Ally Andrews and her family -- her father Hugh, her mother Kelly, her younger brother Jude, her grandmother Lynn and her father's childhood friend Glenn -- who are forced to flee from their home in search of safety while avoiding both vesp swarms and ill-intentioned humans.
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7	Not to be confused with the 1963 Swedish movie ''Film/{{Tystnaden}}'', translated in English as ''The Silence'', or for the 2016 Martin Scorsese film ''Film/{{Silence}}''.
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9	!!This movie provides examples of:
10	* AttackAttackAttack: The vesps seem more motivated by spite than hunger. If it makes noise, they'll dive on it -- and in many cases then abandon it.
11	* BatmanGambit: [[spoiler:The cultists send in a young girl with mobiles set to alarm strapped to her body, to serve as a distraction and to draw the vesps when the alarms go off. Another mobile is strapped to the window of Ally's room, so the vesp will break in there. This causes Ally to flee to the basement where the cultists are waiting to kidnap her.]]
12	* BattleInTheRain: The final fight takes place in a thunderstorm, as it's the only way they can have a fight without the vesps mauling them all to death.
13	* BigHonkingTrafficJam: Causing Glenn to turn off the highway and trailblaze with his SUV before the vesps show up to see who's honking. [[spoiler:Unfortunately a herd of deer cause him to go off the road and crash.]]
14	* CripplingOverspecialization: The vesps have frighteningly sensitive hearing, and can home in on even the faintest noises -- but they have seemingly no senses besides that, not even smell or echolocation, leaving them utterly unable to perceive potential prey or threats standing just feet away from them as long as they're quiet. Further, their absolute reliance on hearing leaves them very vulnerable to loud, omnipresent noises such as fire alarms or thunder, and makes them easy to lure into noisy deathtraps.
15	* {{Cult}}: The Hushed, a doomsday Christian cult that believes the vesps to be a punishment from God unto a sinful world and that [[TongueTrauma ritualistically removes its members' tongues]].
16	* CacophonyCoverUp: One that serves as a ChekhovsGun for the BattleInTheRain, when Hugh and Ally set off the sprinkler system in the pharmacy to escape the vesps nesting there.
17	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: The girl sent in as a TrojanPrisoner [[spoiler:has mobile phones strapped to her like a suicide bomb vest.]]
18	* DugTooDeep: The vesps are released into the world when a spelunking team, while pushing deep into their cave, digs away a rockfall that had sealed the chamber where they had lived for millions of years.
19	* TheEndOrIsIt: Subverted; [[spoiler:the protagonists go OopNorth because the vesps don't like the cold, but Ally thinks that they might adapt. We then see a vesp flying across a land covered in patches of snow and landing on a dead animal filled with vesp eggs...only to get shot by an arrow fired by Ally and her boyfriend. Ally then says they'll just have to adapt as well.]]
20	* EyelessFace: Vesps have no eyes whatsoever -- their heads rise into a smooth, unbroken bony slope above their nostrils.
21	* EyeScream: One of the victims in the movie is subject to this when a vesp jabs its claws into her eye sockets as it proceeds to lift her up.
22	* ExplosiveBreeder: Evidently by their sheer numbers. [[spoiler:Being egg-layers probably helps.]]
23	* FaceFullOfAlienWingWong: The vesps incubate their eggs in the corpses of people and animals they've killed.
24	* FacelessGoons: Most of the Hushed have their heads covered by [[InTheHood hoodies]], and only a few of them (most notably their leader) have their faces exposed.
25	* GoLookAtTheDistraction: Hugh lures a vesp off the car by throwing a crowbar down the road.
26	* HeroicSacrifice:
27	** Glenn, [[spoiler:having been trapped under his wrecked car and knowing he's a goner, gives his life to lure a vesp swarm to himself with gunshots to give the other characters a chance to escape]].
28	** Lynn [[spoiler:sacrifices herself by screaming while entangled with the Hushed cultists trying to kidnap her granddaughter, calling down a flock of vesps to kill them alongside herself]].
29	* HumansAreTheRealMonsters: [[spoiler:The Hushed appear in the third act to terrorize the family and try to steal Ally to use as breeding stock.]]
30	* ItCanThink: Ally notes the vesps attack the same area of the car windows in an attempt to break through them.
31	* KillItWithIce: The vesps can't handle the cold very well at all -- people above the Arctic Circle or high in the mountains are spared due to this, as the intense cold kills any vesp swarms heading too far north or too high up. However Ally wonders [[TheEndOrIsIt if they might eventually adapt to the cold.]]
32	* LikeADuckTakesToWater: Before the vesps appear Ally's mother and father are reluctant to let her go out and do what she wants, but she now finds herself living in a world where silence is a virtue.
33	* LudicrousGibs: Hugh kills a swarm of vesps by luring them into an active woodchipper with the blades' noise, quickly turning the entire swarm into a pile of ground meat. They eventually clog the machine through sheer numbers.
34	* MamaBear: After her daughter is injured and her granddaughter kidnapped, Lynn races after the cultists to take them on with her bare hands.
35	* MorePredatorsThanPrey: Who knows what the vesps were eating before coming to the surface, since they come from an environment already very well known for a distinct lack of biomass.
36	* OffWithHisHead: A rattlesnake gets its head bitten off by a vesp.
37	* PapaWolf:
38	** Hugh is creeped out by the cult but refuses to take the shotgun when they turn up on their doorstep. When the priest writes, ''The girl is fertile'' he gets it straight away and shows he's willing to fire regardless of drawing the vesps. [[spoiler:When they later try kidnapping her, he beats the priest to death with the shotgun butt.]]
39	** Downplayed earlier when Hugh finds out there's a boy at school showing an interest in Ally. While her mother isn't happy, he asks some polite questions about him and takes it as a good sign that he's taken the trouble to learn ASL in order to talk to her.
40	* SayingTooMuch: Or in this case 'signing' too much. When Ally signs ''He's weird'' to her father, it tips off the priest that she knows sign language and therefore would be very useful to The Hushed.
41	* SenseImpairedMonster: The vesps are completely eyeless, and hunt by sound; any noise made in their presence will send swarms of the creatures homing in to devour whatever alerted them, forcing people to maintain near-total silence in areas where vesps have moved in. However, their complete reliance on hearing means that they cannot perceive anything that keeps quiet, and makes them vulnerable to both omnipresent noises such as fire alarms or thunder and to noisy traps.
42	* ShootTheDog: Hugh lets the family dog out of the car because his barking attracted the vesps and will again [[spoiler:as soon as they finish off Glenn]], even though it means the dog is going to be their next meal. Whether this is better or worse than in the original novel, when Hugh ''strangles'' the dog inside the car rather than let it keep barking or risk opening the car door, is debatable.
43	* TheSwarm: Vesps always move in large groups, hunting and killing with a seemingly single-minded purpose.
44	* TrojanHorse: [[spoiler:The Hushed send a little girl to the family's shelter with phones strapped to her body, which are set to activate their alarms not long after the family brings her in.]]
45	* VillainousRescue: One of the vesps indirectly saves Jude from being bitten by a rattlesnake by attacking it and biting off its head.
46	* WhamLine: The Hushed were already creepy enough with their leader pulling a StealthHiBye on Hugh a couple of scenes before, but [[spoiler:the moment they arrive to the house and the leader asks in writing if Ally is fertile, [[PapaWolf Hugh instantly knows that this won't end well]].]]
47	* WickedWasps: While not wasps themselves, the monsters are explicitly likened to them due to their swarming and their aggressive natures, and are named vesps after ''vespa'', the Italian word for wasp. [[spoiler:They are also egg-layers, depositing their eggs on corpses.]]
48	* TheWorldsExpertOnGettingKilled: Glenn the tough guy and survivalist is the first to bite it, thanks to an unfortunately timed herd of deer crossing the road which make him crash his SUV.
49	* WouldHurtAChild: [[spoiler:The girl sent into the house by the Hushed has had her tongue cut out (and from the bruises on her jaw, it wasn't willingly) and is used as TheBait to draw the vesps into the house. If the protagonists hadn't had the decency to remove the mobiles instead of just running for their lives, she would have died horribly.]]
50	* YouWouldntShootMe: The leader of the Hushed isn't concerned when Hugh levels a shotgun at him, being just as aware as Hugh that the noise would get both of them killed. [[PapaWolf Unfortunately he's threatened Hugh's daughter]], so when the priest takes a step towards Hugh, he pulls back a hammer on the shotgun to show he's willing to take that risk. [[spoiler:When he taunts Hugh a second time with this at the climax, Hugh decides to [[ExtremeMeleeRevenge turn the man's head to mulch with the butt of his shotgun]].]]
51	* ZergRush: While individual vesps are hardly harmless, they can still be dealt with easily enough with a distraction or taken out with a single gunshot. The problem is that they almost always attack in huge swarms, overwhelming their prey with unrelenting attacks from every direction and by their ability to soak up enormous losses with minimal impact on their total numbers.

Context Film / TheSilence2019