Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
66
Bandslam
45
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
29
Collector, The
23
Couples Retreat
80
District 9
61
Extract
39
Fame
xx
Fantastic Mr. Fox
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
60
Funny People
32
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
27
Gamer
41
G-Force
39
Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
33
Love Happens
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
51
My Sister's Keeper
42
Orphan
28
Pandorum
63
Perfect Getaway, A
86
Ponyo
35
Post Grad
48
Proposal, The
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
24
Sorority Row
83
Star Trek
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
55
Taking Woodstock
47
Time Traveler's Wife
96
Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3D
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
28
Ugly Truth, The
88
Up
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum
56
Adam
72
Adela
39
Adventures of Power
78
Afghan Star
61
After the Storm
66
Afterschool
xx
All the Best
58
American Casino
72
Amreeka
48
Antichrist
73
Araya
62
Art & Copy
55
As Seen Through These Eyes
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The
13
Beautiful Life, A
70
Beeswax
35
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
71
Big Fan
66
Black Dynamite
51
Blind Date
xx
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
76
Bliss
35
Blue Tooth Virgin, The
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
57
Boys Are Back, The
45
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star
70
Bronson
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
55
Casi Divas
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
59
Collapse
44
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
82
Cove, The
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The
67
Departures
xx
Dil Bole Hadippa
71
Disgrace
xx
Do Knot Disturb
70
Earth Days
24
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat
85
Education, An
55
Endgame
xx
Eulogy for a Vampire
xx
Everyone Else
xx
Fatal Promises
56
Fifty Dead Men Walking
62
Five Minutes of Heaven
74
Flame & Citron
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
28
Free Style
xx
From Mexico with Love
50
Fuel
25
Gentlemen Broncos
50
Give Me Your Hand
58
Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo
52
Grace
66
Harmony and Me
81
Headless Woman, The
xx
Heretics, The
63
Horse Boy, The
73
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
74
Humpday
94
Hurt Locker, The
29
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
16
If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
75
In Search of Beethoven
83
In the Loop
61
Intimate Enemies
42
Irene in Time
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
19
Labor Day
xx
Laila's Birthday
41
Little Ashes
41
Little Traitor, The
66
Liverpool
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
83
Maid, The
xx
Ministers, The
59
More Than a Game
67
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
xx
Mystery Team
48
New York, I Love You
73
Night and Day
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
34
Other Man, The
xx
Painter Sam Francis, The
54
Paper Heart
xx
Paradise
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
44
Peter and Vandy
35
Play the Game
77
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
xx
Pretty Ugly People
65
Providence Effect, The
76
Rembrandt's J'accuse
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
40
Shrink
61
Skin
77
Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, A
xx
Skiptracers
46
Splinterheads
39
St. Trinian's
89
Still Walking
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
55
Storm
65
Tetro
70
That Evening Sun
72
Thirst
xx
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (re-release)
61
Trucker
xx
Turning Green
83
U2 3D
66
Unmade Beds
66
Unmistaken Child
70
Visual Acoustics
55
Walt & El Grupo
67
Way We Get By, The
69
We Live in Public
64
Wedding Song, The
64
Where is Where?
xx
White on Rice
74
Woman in Berlin, A
69
World's Greatest Dad
70
Yes Men Fix the World
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
xx
You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Dead Silence
Generally unfavorable reviews
Based on 15 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 40 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Horror | Mystery | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Leigh Whannell (also story)
James Wan (story)
Directed by: James Wan
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 16, 2007
DVD: June 26, 2007
Running Time: 90 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for horror violence and images
Starring Ryan Kwanten, Amber Valletta, Donnie Wahlberg, Michael Fairman, Joan Heney, Bob Gunton, Laura Regan, and Dmitry Chepovetsky
From the writers and director of "Saw," comes this ghost story set in the sleepy town of Ravens Fair about Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist who went mad. (Universal Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Death Sentence Saw
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Post Kyle Smith
The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department."
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
Boasts nothing new under the sun, but it does provide a few decent scares.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Again coaxing the worst imaginable performances out of his actors (see also: Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in "Saw"), Wan casts charisma-free unknown Ryan Kwanten as a young married man whose small-town past catches up to him.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Scott Brown
Terrified of puppets? Enjoy being scared? Then you'll be half-satisfied with Dead Silence, a rote horror pantomime.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Wan does manage to infuse his film with some of the subtle unsubtleties of classic Euro-horror outings, chief among them the palpable, dreamlike sense of dislocation and the abiding severance from reality that tends to make nongenre fans wonder if someone spiked their popcorn with LSD.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Jim Ridley
Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential. As creaky nonsense goes, though, this is chock-full of corny goodness down to its hilarious sense-shredding "twist," which the movie reveals like a magician proudly unveiling a dead rabbit.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason Anderson
The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
There are no two ways about it: A chubby-cheeked dummy doing stuff it shouldn't be doing is spooky stuff. But Wan isn't on such sure footing with his actors -- Wahlberg is stilted as the tough-guy cop, and Kwanten is blandly uninteresting.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
Too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz
The director, James Wan, and the writer, Leigh Whannell (the team behind the controversially brutal "Saw" series), deliver the mandatory shocks and gross-outs, backed by dissonant bursts of music and made almost elegant by the cinematographer John R. Leonetti's desaturated images.
Read Full Review >Variety Staff (Not credited)
Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
As "Saw" demonstrated, Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub
There's no attempt at humor in Dead Silence, but the biggest sin in the film is the lack of scares.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Ed Gonzalez
A conflation of the horror genre's laziest tropes, plot angles and shorthands, this inept creation isn't so much a film as it is a smorgasbord.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.8 (out of 10) based on 40 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Amarilis M. gave it an8:
I don't usually get scared by movies, but this one was spooky. I actually liked it better than the Saw movies, which are making me sick already.
John gave it a1:
James Wan should never direct, he should go back to his day job, and not get into movie indsutry.
Donna gave it a9:
The acting had me in stitches. As did the dolls. It's kind of a Chucky meets Nightmare on Elm St. But I liked it! It even made me jump once, which movies never do. The ending was... imaginative... think that's the nicest way of putting it! It was a big twist, but one of those silly ones that tries to make you go "ooooh!", unfortunately it didn't quite work that way.. Rather than being shocked by the ending, I was amused to see how far the writers had stretched it. Nonetheless, I thought it was a great film and will be watching it again! Although I'm yet to figure out why I enjoyed it so much..
Jonathan s. gave it a3:
The movie could have easily taken a turn as a throwback/satire of all those old, terrible horror conventions, and it most likely would have been better if it had. Look at all the most generic aspects of the horror genre (or at least the oldest, and, now, never really used any more): a mysterious package with no sender listed; constant, inexplicable lightning and thunder that appears even though there was no previous signs of even rain falling; a weird hotel room and cemetery; a dusty, cob-web filled (and of course cavernous) theatre (which would normally have been a mansion in other cases); and of course a town lynching and the vengeful spirit that comes as a result. Not to mention horrific acting-- a must. However, unfortunately, the movie was fully meant to be taken seriously, and, as a result, was pretty much insufferable except for a few minutes of footage every now and then. The beginning was undeniably the worst part, due mostly to the atrocious pacing and poor writing that seems to have been just hastily thrown together for that scene to exist and set up the following "plot." And from then on, the pacing is just as uneven throughout most of the movie until you reach the flashback-- which, by the way, was the only intriguing part of the movie, along with a few minutes that followed it-- which was paced and filmed well (or maybe it was all just relative, compared to what we just had to sit through). The pace didn't stay completely even after that for very long, but it was still much improved. The dialogue-- sorry New York Post-- WAS terrible, in all cases, and was (in my opinion) probably the main reason Wahlberg did such a bad job with the part. It's like the Star Wars Prequel Effect-- actors who have proven that they can do a good job are given horrific dialogue, and their performance is reduced exponentially. The only reason to attribute this movie a 3 is because of the minor jump-scene scares it elicited (but only on a 50% mark), cinematography which deserves a much better movie to go with it, and the fact that there were points in the movie where I was somewhat interested in what happened (though that amounts to maybe 15 minutes of screen time in a 90 minute movie). As for the "twist"-- well at least it was SOMEWHAT contextual to the plot, unlike the first Saw's-- which, really, wasn't a twist at all and added absolutely nothing to the movie whatsoever. However, the twist still didn't really have to much effect on the plot. And given the fact that it was such a terrible movie up to that point, and the fact that we had basically already suspended all disbelief (most likely due to brain cells shutting down)-- it wasn't terrible, just about 95% illogical. The only other thing I can say the movie had going for it, was the fact that the innovators of the splat-pack did manage to make a horror movie that didn't rely on gore, and actually built minor tension every now and then. That, and this was an incredibly tame "R" movie, even more so when looking at the people behind it. And Calvin H., sorry the twist wasn't great-- just because you can't see a twist coming doesn't mean it's good (especially when they don't even add much to the movie)-- in fact, if you have absolutely no idea about a twist, it's likely a bad one, since a good twist will still leave evidence along the way (and no, three seconds of cumulative footage "explaining" the twist does not count as laying evidence-- please go watch Shyamalan movies or, if you thought this twist was good, you might enjoy even the predictable twist in Se7en). And Norm D. (I'm on a roll here), no, you seem to be one of the few people who hasn't seen this doen a million times before, and can't seem to recognize that all the things you're saying are basically untrue. This "freaky idea" would barely even hold up as a Supernatural episode. And in terms of what more do we want than "eyes moving"? Are you serious? I'm a sixteen year old boy who has a horror fix, and I can still basically see all these things you somehow can't. I honestly hope you're a 10 year old who wants to see grown up movies (which I also would hope accounts for your atrocious writing). So for anyone actually reading this, it does work as a cheap horror fix, but I would strongly suggest other movies to help out the fix: The Descent, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest horror movies to come out in quite some time; 28 Weeks Later, one hell of an incredible thrill ride; even guilty pleasures like Hostel, which at least is well shot, pretty well acted, and at least has a smart script (or themes to it, if you'd rather). So I would generally reccommend against this movie, even to those who think it'll be scary because of the doll-- the eyes moving, head turning schtick gets old pretty quickly, sicne that's about the only gimmick they employ. Honestly, I had realized this was going to suck utterly, but I had expected some good scares given the premise. Unfortunately, no.
A Movie Critic gave it a6:
Pretty decent horror movie. James Wan (Saw 1) is a really good director who can really build to some great scares. Unfortunately, he's working with a pretty dumb script and scenario, and the movie can't escape its "B-movie" feel. The twist ending at the end is REALLY stretching it, although I'll praise it for being, at least, unique. Still, the movie itself feels a little slow at times, James Wan yet again reverts to the "clowns are scary" technique to scare people (they're not scary.) and there aren't really many likable characters here. Still...decent horror movie. I would have been disappointed if I saw it in a theater but it makes pretty decent DVD entertainment.
Melanie M gave it a0:
This film had no redeeming qualities...the rhyme was annoying (can 'Shaw' and 'dolls' even be considered slant rhyme?), the acting was probably the most horrific aspect of this movie...and I'm not certain that the directors have been in an actual graveyard--most of the tombstones would read 'Betty' or 'Fred' with no last name or date. Also, Mary Shaw's grave was in pristine condition, even though she had died like 50 years earlier and her headstone was covered in these weird cockleburr-type things--a setting needs realistic details, otherwise, it's just a distraction. Those "atmospheric effects" were like trying to watch a movie through a dang smokescreen--if you plan on watching this, invest in some good glasses.
Calvin H. gave it a10:
I don't give a crap what the critics say, I thought the movie had its scary moments and as always in any of James Wan's movies there is a great twist.
