Soft & Quiet Review
Soft & Quiet (2022) Film Review from the 29th Annual South by Southwest Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Beth de Araujo and starring Stefanie Estes, Nina E. Jordan, Jon Beavers, Jayden Leavitt, Olivia Luccardi, Cissy Ly, Dana Millican, Melissa Paulo, Eleanore Pienta and Rebekah Wiggins. Soft & Quiet seems to open with a female kindergarten teacher’s concern for a young child who is waiting for his mother to arrive. This teacher soon heads over to meet up with a group of women. She’s carrying a pie. The credits come on and we feel an odd kind of sense of dread. Then, after a few minutes, we realize just exactly what’s going on with this teacher whose name is Emily (she’s played by Stefanie Estes) and that sense of discomfort we feel throughout the opening credits comes to fruition as the group of women she is meeting with is actually a white supremacist group. Written and directed by Beth de Araujo, Soft & Quiet plays out initially as one of the most disturbing, and important films ever made. These white women in this group seem to be people who could be your friends and neighbors. With friends like these, saying that you’ll never need enemies is an understatement.
Advertisement
At a church, this group of women discusses what’s on their minds from an “All Lives Matter” discussion to a talk about why some woman with darker skin recently “stole” a job from someone with lighter skin. One of the women is new to the group and is an ex-con. She’s named Leslie (Olivia Luccardi). When the women discuss obtaining a list of “illegals” in the neighborhood, the audience may begin to think these women have too much free time on their hands. The pastor of the church knows what’s going on and wouldn’t mind if these women took it elsewhere. In fact, he tells them that they better take their “business” somewhere else before he gets in trouble. At a local store where these women come together, a disturbing scenario occurs. This store is owned by one of the members of the group, Kim (Dana Millican), who is against Jewish people as well as any other person who is different from her. Two Asian American young women who are shopping in the convenience store, Anne and Lily (played by Melissa Paulo and Cissy Ly), promise to spend money there and they are embarrassed and ridiculed even after one of them proves to be a paying customer. It gets really ugly. She’s accused of illegal activity for having $300 in cash on her to spend, but the woman claims she’s simply a waitress. The main action shifts to the house of the Asian woman, Anne, whose home the members of the group break into and whose passport this group of women conspire to steal. Emily’s boyfriend Craig (Jon Beavers) also becomes entangled in this disgusting scenario. All hell proceeds to break loose. This film is presented in one continuous take and is excellent for bringing to light the horrifying complexity of the lives of the white women who decide to live with hate and fear instead of love and understanding. Writer/director Beth de Araujo presents dialogue that can be realistic at times and, perhaps, a bit exaggerated at other times but the spoken words in the film always remain intriguing because what if these women were real? In today’s climate, they are, unfortunately, more realistic than not. Almost certainly, these types of people do exist and, in fact, with real-life recent hate crimes in the media, we know that hate is a real issue that exists in the world today. While de Araujo presents her themes effectively for at least an hour, the movie falls apart towards the end with shaky camera work that feels like something out of The Blair Witch Project which wouldn’t be such a problem if the whole movie was presented that way. By starting out as a film that is dialogue driven and ending up as one which is visually driven (or rather sound driven), the movie feels uneven. We end up with something like Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors crossed with The Blair Witch Project which is an odd combination. I, in all, honesty, didn’t follow some of the scenes towards the end because they were too dark although I heard the characters’ fear perfectly. That could have been the intention but what was working so early in the film ends up tossed to the side in order to become a more standard horror picture. With that said, the first hour of Soft & Quiet cannot be ignored. This movie leaves its viewers terrified of the ideas and acts that some human beings are capable of thinking and carrying out. While the performances are all noted for their bravery and compelling nature to tell such an important story, the ending is just too dark (literally) and we lose sight (again, literally) of what the movie originally tried to do. However, I’m giving the movie a pass and recommending it because of what it does so well in the early stages of the movie. I don’t think anything else is scarier than the thought of your next door neighbors being monsters who look like angels. That’s the idea de Araujo leaves behind with her compelling new film and is welcome in a world where you never know what people are really thinking underneath their kinds smiles and spoken words. This is still a very important film despite its flaws. Rating: 7.5/10 Leave your thoughts on this Soft & Quiet review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more South By Southwest Film Festival news can visit our South By Southwest Film Festival Page, our Film Festival Page, and our Film Festival Facebook Page. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, and Flipboard.
