And yet they march into this desperate bid for survival with all the energy of an afternoon nap. Here you have a family who is witnessing the world as they know it fall to pieces. Making matters worse, the tone of The Silence is strangely subdued. But this too is fumbled by a rush to carnage, then a conclusion so abrupt that I rewound, thinking the streaming video had somehow skipped. The best Leonetti manages is a sequence where the family must quietly crawl through a tunnel, in which a dangerous animal lurks. Instead violence erupts abruptly, which is fine for jump scares, but not satisfying for building tension. But The Silence offers no such elegant suspense because it lacks scare setups. And then it comes and we are jolted with terror and a certain sweet satisfaction in release of that tension. We quiver in horrible anticipation of what's to come. Consider A Quiet Place: The opening sequence sets up that noise is bad, the toy spaceship makes noise, and the little boy took the batteries to allow it to make noise. To brew that, Leonetti needs to give us something to anticipate. The family's plan was very vague to begin with so their journey has no specific destination and a muddled sense of progress.

Play More vexing, there's little sense of momentum in The Silence. Unlike in A Quiet Place, there are no subtitles, so again and again swaths of exchanges might be lost in lack of translation, leaving us wondering what is going on! Unlucky for the audience, The Silence isn't interested in translating sign language conversations. So at least they know how to communicate without audible conversation that might attract the homicidal mega-bats.

But lucky for them, their daughter's traumatic accident from three years back struck her deaf. They also haven't considered how bringing the family dog might be bad strategy. Where specifically? They haven't thought that through. Being twenty miles away from Manhattan, the Andrews clan makes a hasty plan to abandon their home and head north. Set loose from a deep, subterranean cave, these killer bats swiftly overtake big cities. The once quiet skies of upstate New York crackle with the threat of a massive flock of man-eating creatures. Leonetti ( Annabelle, Wish Upon), The Silence follows the Andrews family as they seek salvation from a looming terror.

The silence by tim lebbon