leilapostgrad Review of The Quiet

The Quiet (2005)

Austin Movie Show Review -- disturbing, but well done

[7/10 · 3 September 2006]

When Jailbait opened a few weeks ago, I thought that was the most disturbing thing I'd ever seen on film – a young guy in prison getting butt raped by his cellmate every day, for the next 25 years of his life. The Quiet is even more shocking and traumatizing. The first film from U.T.'s Burnt Orange Productions to get national distribution, The Quiet is about a young deaf girl named Dot (Camilla Belle) who moves into a foster home where the father (Martin Donovan) rapes his 16-year-old daughter (Elisha Cuthbert) on a nightly basis, while the mom (Edie Falco) lies in bed, passed out on prescription pain killers. If I were a young film student at U.T. working on this crew, I don't know how I'd tell my parents about the project I was working on for school ("Hey dad, I'm working on this movie about an incestuous father…"). It really is well done. It's so painful to watch precisely because the acting and dialogue are so believable. Cuthbert's character is tortured, but doesn't even realize it. She acts like she enjoys having sex with her father, when clearly it's rape. She flirts with him one minute and talks about killing him the next. The reason though, that this is more disturbing than Jailbait is because we actually see the father and daughter having sex. We see them in bed, kissing, and him mounting her. Now there's something you don't see on screen every day (thank god!). When the daughter announces that she's pregnant, The Quiet quickly rises to a whole new level of shock and disgust. Overall, it's a well-done production, but you can be sure this is a movie I'm not buying on DVD.