Proof that any sound can be used as a jump scare if you try hard enough.
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“The Quiet Ones” is the latest scary movie to hit theaters, this one about a professor who is studying a subject who’s relation to the paranormal is a mystery to him and his small crew experimenting on her. As he attempts to scientifically engage with the process things continue to ravel out of his control. So let’s start with the good.
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This cast is on it’s game. Jared Harris is confident and clever as this professor and the newcomers playing the students who join him all seem to fill their roles quite nicely. I also really enjoyed, and lets call this the best thing, the way the filmmakers showed restraint with the now ubiquitous “found footage” gimmick. This is one of those movies that felt like it could very easily been conceived as a 100 percent found footage endeavor but the movie used it sparingly and I might add effectively. You see, for me it’s like sweet tea. I can enjoy it but I usually have to mix it with regular tea so that the sweetness isn’t too much. In the same way, I think the idea of “in movie footage” has to be cut with typical movie storytelling for the effect to work for me overall, and here I feel like that is the case. I also thought some of the sound design in this was pretty nifty, even if overall it was a little over the top.
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I mean seriously how many “jump sounds” do we need in one movie? I can only assume the title of this movie is meant to be ironic, as the theater was blasted with windows closing, windows breaking, doors knocking, people clapping, corks popping, Beds breaking, Dogs barking, and chandeliers falling, just to name a few. And each time it follows creepy silence to a loud BANG, to get us to jump out of our seats. We get it already, you want us all to drop dead with a heart attack, but come on, these are the cheapest scares in the book Find some original ways to make us grip our armrests and spill our popcorn instead of relying literally on just saying “BOO!” Maybe some of this audio assault was meant to hide the fact that there really isn’t much going on here story wise. Our characters don’t seem to grow and it’s hard to invest in any of them, to the point where the storytelling aspect of this just feels boring and even cliche. None of these themes of science interacting with the paranormal were fresh to me and I think the movie suffers for it.
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At the end of the day, “The Quiet Ones” is a scary movie that relies on cheap stunts more than true dread to scare the audience. Even with a decent cast and some good acting, a tired story keeps it down at a C-
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