film | Silence is moldin'

Maybe director Jamie Babbit has never actually interacted with someone who's hearing impaired, or maybe the characters in THE QUIET are all a bunch of stupid idiots. Either way, her ridiculous potboiler proffers a plot twist that crashes an orgy of sensationalist camp topicality masquerading as a "serious" psychological thriller. The Quiet is equal parts after-school special, American Beauty-esque suburban-scandal drama, and Mean Girls rewritten as a lurid V.C. Andrews page-turner, and if I made it sound goofy and amusing, please accept my apologies. It's neither, especially once you factor in that there's no winking chink in the film's solemn facade, which is odd considering that Babbit's prior work — the sexuality-conversion farce But I'm a Cheerleader, episodes of the plastic-surgery soap Nip/Tuck — flaunts her flair for the outrageous-aware.

Camilla Belle of that awful When a Stranger Calls redux plays a deaf-mute orphaned teen who's taken in by her wealthy godparents, but since their little-miss-bitch daughter (24's Elisha Cuthbert) relentlessly antagonizes Belle at school and home — and especially because dad (The Opposite of Sex's Martin Donovan) has a sicko predilection that mom (The Sopranos' Edie Falco) swills pills to avoid dealing with — their philanthropy doesn't make much sense. But the aforementioned revelation here has to do with Belle's true nature, which: A) when discovered and used against Belle by Cuthbert, still doesn't provide a good-enough reason for Belle to not blow the whistle on her new family's creepy secret; and B) is concealed pretty sloppily, given that anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to Belle might wonder how she appears to understand what people say to her without concentrating on their lips. Well, read mine: With its room-temp stabs at shock value, The Quiet comes off as a Lifetime-network movie featuring flashes of pay-cable kink. D