Critic Reviews

The film unfolds like a runaway train, a rapid-fire thriller and drama and horror film all in one, both breathless and breathtaking.

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.

Soft and Quiet is the most unsettling real-life horror movie since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The seemingly uninterrupted single take with a handheld camera fits the production perfectly.

The film — and in turn the director — demands a lot from viewers; even with ample warning and disclaimers, it won’t be for everyone. Those who can stomach it will be rewarded with a courageous work of art.

One of the most audacious American debuts of the year, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s Soft & Quiet shocks one’s system from its opening moments and doesn’t ever slow down to let you fully process it as it happens.

This is powerful filmmaking that goes beyond just vilifying racist scum, and asks hard questions about what hate hath wrought.

The film comes directly from its writer-director’s own lived experiences with racism, which gives it a rawness and an urgency that’s hard to ignore. And given America's cognitive dissonance about the looming threat of white supremacy in this country, an unsparing take on the issue like this one is very much needed. If you feel sick watching this movie, that means it’s working.

In depicting the rapid escalation from closeted bigotry to outright hate crime, Soft & Quiet communicates the urgency of identifying and standing up to similarly hateful groups in our own communities, which are never as “secret” as they wish to be.

Soft & Quiet is deeply unpleasant to watch, but that’s the point.

To say Soft & Quiet is designed to get your blood boiling is an understatement—it makes its intentions very clear when a pie for the meeting is unwrapped, revealing a swastika.