Mark Reviews Movies: SOFT & QUIET

Soft & Quiet, Momentum Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 3, 2022

Director Beth de Araújo refuses to look away in Soft & Quiet. That's a bit discomforting at first, as the technique allows a group of characters to have an uninterrupted platform for spouting unquestioned hatred for a long stretch of time. That section of the screenplay, though, becomes necessary—even if the length of the sequence certainly isn't—as the film's real point becomes clear. Words point toward attitudes, and attitudes have consequences. The ones here are horrifyingly inevitable.

The technical gimmick has de Araújo following a group of women over the course of an evening in real time and, seemingly, in one, unedited take (Lindsay Armstrong's credit as the film's editor, obviously, lets us know there's some trickery occurring here, but the effect and its effect on the material are seamless). At first, everything appears normal.

We meet Emily (Stefanie Estes), a kindergarten teacher in a small town who seems kind and caring. After school, she sits with a student whose mother is running late, and Emily lets the boy read the children's book manuscript she recently finished. A school janitor works in the background, and Emily tells the kid he needs to stand up for himself. The janitor shouldn't be mopping floors while he's still there, and the boy should stand up for himself and tell her as much. It's a strange moment—the first that lets us know something isn't quite right with Emily. By the time she arrives at her next stop, we realize just how insidious the moment really is.

When the boy's mom finally arrives and compliments the teacher that she'll make a great mother, it's a bit of a gut punch for Emily. She and her husband have been trying to become parents, we learn, and that information takes on a different dimension, too. There's a lot happening beneath the surface here, and de Araújo makes such ordinary and superficially sympathetic moments into sinister ones in retrospect.

Everything becomes perfectly clear after Emily's long walk from school to the woods, where she's planning to join some friends and friends of friends for the inaugural meeting of a club she's starting. The other women are all smiles and laughs and pleasant conversation. They have brought beverages and snacks, and the centerpiece desert is a pie that Emily has freshly baked.

When she takes off the foil from the dish, the pie is notable for one detail in particular. There's a swastika carved into the top crust.

From there, everything about these characters falls into place, and de Araújo's story comes into focus, too. The film's purpose and method, though, are a bit shaky in the immediately aftermath of this key revelation, and much of that, of course, can be blamed on the gimmick.

Since we're witnessing everything as it unfolds and from the perspective of a single camera, the film forces us to endure minutes upon minutes of Emily and her group's opinions and rhetoric. Emily and the others—including the likes Leslie (Olivia Luccardi), Kim (Dana Millican), and Marjorie (Elanore Pienta)—talk non-stop about their prejudices against various groups, their beliefs in white supremacy, and a litany of related subjects with the same smiles and surface-level gentleness that they have upon greeting each other.

No one, of course, could accuse de Araújo of offering a positive view of these opinions, especially considering where this plot goes. In playing them straight for such a long period of time and without any opposition, though, the scene becomes repetitive and an echo chamber for hateful sentiments packaged in contexts that are, by the women's design, intended to come across as something else. This is treading a fine line, to be sure, and we simply have to trust that the filmmaker will make a point that goes deeper than simply revealing these characters as the overt racists, sexists, and xenophobes that they try to hide appearing as.

To make the point perfectly clear, de Araújo does take this material further than pointing out of the obvious. Yes, these women are hateful, and despite the "soft and quiet" manner with which they attempt to present themselves, they start to become more aggressive and more arrogant, simply by voicing those opinions, coming up with plans, and being together.

After being kicked out of the meeting location, Emily suggests the group moves on to her house, and they'll stop for a bottle or two of wine at Kim's shop. A pair of women of Asian descent—who know Emily and, more notably, are aware of what her brother is currently in prison for—show up. The white women, feeling empowered by everything that has unfolded, start insulting, abusing, extorting, and threatening the two.

What follows that scene shouldn't be described, because it is shocking, although not surprising, and becomes a sequence of grounded, unbearable terror. The camera only adjusts or removes its gaze when the actions are too horrible to witness, but the focus never leaves Emily and her cohorts, who take their false mentality of victimization to its furthest extreme as they literally victimize others. The performances here are chilling in their cold inhumanity, their cruel selfishness, or, in the case of the two sisters (played by Cissy Ly and Melissa Paulo) who cross the women's paths, their abject terror becoming unthinkable grief.

This is undeniably difficult to watch. While that's an essential part of de Araújo's point, the more vital element is in how Soft & Quiet depicts the inescapable escalation of thoughts, to words, and, finally, to actions. Such beliefs have only one end point, and this is it.

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