Ryan Kwanten in Universal Pictures' Dead Silence
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Mania Grade: C+
Reviewed Format: Theatrical Release
Rated: R
Stars: Ryan Kwanten, Donnie Wahlberg, Amber Valletta, Michael Fairman, Bob Gunton, Laura Regan
Writers: Leigh Whannell, story by James Wan & Leigh Whannell
Director: James Wan
Distributor: Universal Pictures

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"Dead Silence"

There are a couple of gimmicks in Dead Silence that, at first glance, seem promising. One is to have a horror film built around ventriloquist dummies, which give plenty of people the heebie-jeebies in real life. This actually works to an extent. The other gimmick is that whenever supernatural badness is going to take place, all ambient sound exits the environment, except for whatever the main character is doing. This doesn’t work so well, partly because we quickly figure out that, so long as there is ambient sound, nothing very scary is going to happen, and partly because the story logic doesn’t support it. Oh, yes, and the evil ghost can get you if you scream. 

Dead Silence is brought to us by the same creative team that did the first Saw – director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell (they collaborated on the story here) – but a lot of what made their first movie work is missing. For starters, the environments go from mundane to Grand Guignol, but they’re never viscerally disturbing. Now, this isn’t meant that these gentlemen are condemned to do all their good work on sets that resemble the one in the beginning of Saw, but they just can’t work up the same kind of dread with something that looks like it hails from either an old Hammer film, a Disney ride, or some strange mixture of both.  

In Dead Silence, Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) is a nice young urbanite married to nice young Lisa (Laura Regan). The couple receive a mysterious package on their doorstep containing a ventriloquist’s dummy that starts behaving very oddly. Soon Lisa is gruesomely murdered, Ryan is the prime suspect of Detective Jim Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg, who did Saw II and III) and the trail leads back to Ryan’s hometown of Ravens Fair, a place in serious decline where the few remaining locals are in dread of the ghost of ventriloquist Mary Shaw. 

It’s clear that Wan and Whannell mean to pay homage to the horror films of yore – the photography is as black and white as color film can be, except when red pops bloodily forward – but they are at once too bound by their mythology and not enough in control of it. If Dead Silence genuinely creeped us out in the manner of, say, some of the scarier Japanese ghost movies, coherence wouldn’t matter so much, but since huge portions of the running time are given over to Jamie trying to get answers, we start to have a lot of questions of our own, which are never answered satisfactorily. They also don’t seem to know how to use the puppets for maximum terror – it’s a case where the filmmakers know that a thing should be scary without apparently knowing why so many people find it scary and therefore misusing it. 

There are some first-rate gore effects here and some eerie images that demonstrate how potent Dead Silence could be if handled differently. There’s a twist ending, as we’d expect here, but by then, it’s hard to be invested in our initial perceptions, let alone surprises. The production values are good and the performances are valiant – some of the characters have tons of exposition to deliver – but apart from some gruesome creativity, the film is not satisfying either as straight-out horror or horror nostalgia.