Soft & Quiet

The formal conceit forces you, in fact, to pay attention to how easily combustible incidents like the ones you see in Soft & Quiet are, and acknowledge how embedded into our modern firmament this prettified poison is now.

Soft & Quiet is extremely effective as a piece of educational agitprop.

Within 90 minutes, their monstrous worldview turns them into murderous home invaders, and though the timeframe is arguably an exaggeration, it gets the point across succinctly.

The film is a palpable joyride steered by the kinds of women who, de Araújo seems to think, could easily get away with it.

Gave me the worst panic attack I’ve ever had during a film screening.

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

I could actually feel my stomach churning and see my arms trembling as I held them over my face ... I was anticipating a lot of discomfort and hard-to-watch moments in Soft & Quiet, but this film exceeded even those expectations.

The terrifying thing about this film is that it allows us to see how movements of destruction of others for ethnic reasons can emerge from unexpected places. [Full review in Spanish]

All we're left with by the end of the film is anger, death, and, especially for racialized audiences, trauma. More significantly, and detrimentally as far as the movie-watching experience goes, we're left with nothing we didn't already know.

Once Soft & Quiet leads the audience past the point of no return during a tour de force sequence set at an otherwise peaceful lake cabin, de Araújo enters the dark and suffocating territory...