SXSW Review: Blumhouse’s ‘Soft & Quiet’
deadline.comHardly for the first time, Blumhouse has its name on a horror melodrama fueled by a strong pulse of politically topical blood running through its veins, this time with the ironically titled Soft & Quiet.
In fact, Beth de Araújo’s debut feature is far more notable for its throbbing political outrage than for its dramatic credibility, which becomes increasingly hard to swallow as the yarn unravels.
But righteous young and lefty audiences will enjoy getting cranked up by the increasingly outrageous behavior exhibited by a group of aggrieved and incensed right-wing women whose idea of taking matters into their own hands goes more than a bit too far.If it weren’t for the up-front ideological issues propelling the action here, the writer-director’s bow would certainly have been most noted for her decision to deliver the 91-minute film in one take, even though this feat has now been accomplished in at least 40 previous films, admittedly very few of them commercial ones.All the same, the driving force behind this nearly all-female enterprise—both behind and before the camera—is political outrage, specifically that triggered in liberal-lefty circles by the perceived retrograde, take-the-law-into-your-own-hands attitudes of many on the far right.
The particular actions taken by the more aggressive women in the film are so unmotivated, far-fetched and extreme as to seem flat-out ridiculous dramatically.
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