“Soft and Quiet” begins as subtly as its title implies. It sneaks up on you. By the time you realize what it’s actually about, it’s too late and you are swept into a narrative (and a world) that you do not want to be a part of.
Writer/director Beth de Araújo’s movie starts with a shot of Emily (Stephanie Estes), who cries after taking a pregnancy test. The camera follows her from this vulnerable moment to the insides of an elementary school and into a conversation with a second-grader in her class, who is waiting for his mother to pick him up. Emily is blonde, beautiful, and dressed in a pure white pantsuit. We learn that she’s an educator, is writing a children’s story, and has baked a pie for a meeting she has.
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Reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s “Slacker,” at least at first, cinematographer Greta Zozula’s camera meanders after Emily and other characters as they head to what we find out is her women’s meeting. We wander with her, in real-time, as she meets Leslie (Olivia Luccardi) who is walking to the same place and they make vague small talk along the way. Aside from the mesmerizing camerawork, and the viewer getting swept along this journey, we’re still in the dark as to what is going on, who these women are, and what we’re being swept into. That’s the beauty of the film, as the events take on a logical succession and outcome, but we disbelieve what is inevitably going to happen next.
Emily’s meeting, it turns out, is a meeting of like-minded white supremacist housewives who call themselves the “Daughters of Unity.” But, by the time the viewer realizes this, it is too late to escape the inevitably horrific journey which follows. Like Hannah Arendt’s theories of the “Banality of Evil” brought to life, this nefarious book club is made more terrifying by the fact that we know they exist in the world, as suggested by the idea that white women overwhelmingly voted against their interests when casting their ballots for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Worse still, they’re convinced that they are on the side of right.
Immersing us in the center of the ring of women, Zuzola’s camera circles as one-by-one, the women present their grievances and desires — for a white ethnostate, for a repeal of equity laws in workplaces, and to send people back to where they came from. Above all, they want to stop the new “anti-white” laws that they name as being antithetical to America’s founding. Events like the January 6th, 2021 attack on the capital offers proof that these people exist, whether in real-life or in online spaces, or in real life, and a large percentage of them are women. “Soft and Quiet” places us in the center of this uncomfortable setting, embedding us in a group of true believers. In doing so, it implicates us in the action too, making the movie even more terrifying and utterly upsetting.
A movie shot in one take, “Soft and Quiet” joins the distinguished company of others that have accomplished this feat, including, famously, “Russian Ark” and more recently, the cult Japanese zombie film “One Take of the Dead.” In popular criticism and filmmaking circles, one takes (or oners) have become common currency for auteur status and almost guarantee membership to the contemporary cinematic canon. In recent cinema and TV, one takes, like their counterparts, split diopter shots, and zoom shots while tracking backward have become cinematic cliché; often a nod to cinematic pioneers who perfected these linguistic tools. Thankfully, “Soft and Quiet’s” one take does not belong to this cliched category. Here, the one take is an essential narrative tool, and crucial to the slow journey that the viewer experiences with the characters in the movie.
Far from being cliched, however, the skillful work of the director, cinematographer, and actors, makes the journey of these characters — starting with their everyday realities to the inevitably violent outcome of these aberrant philosophies. The women go out and look for trouble — and the minivan full of “Karens” find it in a random encounter with a pair of Asian women. Needless, to say, these details are merely descriptive when, in fact, the movie is one to be experienced and felt, rather than read. In this sense, the movie reminds one of Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” — though not in terms of content, but in terms of the inescapable and horrifying ride that lingers long after you watch the movie. By meeting Asians in the store, by hurling abusive comments at them, and by continuing to horrifying outcomes, the movie also reminds us of the real-world consequences of these seemingly harmless philosophies when put into action. “Soft and Quiet” is a movie of our time, and anti-Asian hate movements are only one of its many recipes for disasters.
It’s not surprising that Blumhouse picked up this movie for their 2022 slate. What is horrifying is the everyday, the banal, and the sheer evil dressed up in white pantsuits, driving minivans, and disavowing any racial progress that America has made in the past 100 years. These issues lie at the heart of anti-Critical Race Theory propaganda, the fatal attacks on mosques and synagogues, if not the massive revolt on the capital. The horror of “Soft and Quiet” is in our encounter with these ideas spoken aloud in such a liberated space. The horror is realizing that these meetings are happening, in real life, all over America.
True to many of the best horror films, “Soft and Quiet” processes the nightmarish details from this moment and reconstitutes them in its awful, yet compelling journey. The movie’s conceit, a one-take journey that begins in an average day and ends in total darkness, takes the viewer on a horrific ride along, as characters who do not fully understand the effects of their ideas play them out in the movie, with dire and catastrophic results. It is hard to watch, but for all the right reasons. That we are embedded in this journey, that we are part of this cinematic world also means that we’re guilty too. Guilty of these ideas. Guilty of this journey, and ultimately, guilty of these fatal outcomes. [A-]
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