Horst_In_Translation Review of The Quiet Room

The Quiet Room (2018)

Does not really succeed with the old formulas and new inspirations it uses

[4/10 · 15 September 2019]

"The Quiet Room" is an American live action short film from 2018 in the English language and by now probably the most known filmmaking effort by writer and director Sam Wineman because these slightly under half an hour really garnered a great deal of awards recognition that genuinely surprise me, not because the film is a failure or so, but honestly I did not really see the quality. But if we look at the protagonist's color and sexual orientation, I guess it is a movie thaat comes in quite handy with current movements and developments, but still it should not be forgotten to come up with quality story-telling and and an interesting overall outcome in the face of these and this is not it in my opinion. The actors are all doing a fairly solid job overall I guess without truly standing out. The lead actor could have been better though as he is basically in this film from beginning to end, but he does not really justify his lead actor status. What stays most memorable about him in the end is his hair probably. Now as for the story, we have a young man who is suicidal and tries to take his life, but survives and ends up in a clinic where he accidentally unleashes a dangerous spirit that turns out really murderous and is far from the main character's inner demon only. There also realism gets a bit in the way as we see no accurate police work / representation as it would/should have been the case in reality. So I think the path Wineman took, it is not really working overall. Maybe it would have been a better idea to leave the supernatural out and just keep this at psychological horror levels. Or maybe even turn it into a crime thriller. It still would have been more convincing than how they actually did it. But I can see why they chose this direction. Horror films just make more headlines and even if it does not have a large amount of votes here on imdb (yet), it was seen by half a million people already on Youtube in not even three months and yeah with the awards recognition I mentione dearlier, it is definitely a success. So well done to them from that perspective. And my negative criticisms are almost all subjective anyway, so maybe others will like the film more. Oh well, they actually did already. Finally I want to say that I was not too inspired by the old ideas used here for this one, the jump scares on 2 or 3 occasions and also the very last shot that felt almost too generic already. I give "The Quiet Room" a thumbs-down all in all because it felt longer than it actually was and the weak and uninteresting moments were more frequent in my opinion than the good and convincing. Watch something else instead.