“A Quiet Place” didn’t need any dialogue to become a breakout hit at the box office. John Krasinski’s near-silent horror film opened to $50 million and is destined to gross over $100 million by the end of its run. Fortunately, it’s not the only modern film to take an artistic risk and go the silent route.
Click through the gallery for 15 of the best modern films with barely any dialogue.
John Krasinski’s studio debut is set in a future where monsters hunt sound and kill anything that makes noise. Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, and Millicent Simmonds play a family forced to communicate through sign language in order to survive.
Robert Redford gives a towering performance in J.C. Chandor’s near-silent survival drama. The actor plays a boat captain who wakes up to find his vessel is sinking after colliding with a shipping container. For 105 increasingly tense minutes, we watch as Redford solves one problem after the next to stay alive.
Michel Hazanavicius’ Hollywood love letter about a silent movie star struggling to adapt to “talkies” is brilliantly told as a black-and-white silent film itself. Ludovic Bource’s acclaimed score expertly charts each character’s emotional arc.
Jean-Jacques Annaud’s French drama is adapted from the novel “The Grizzly King” and tells the story of an orphaned bear cub who befriends an older grizzly as hunters chase them through the wild. The film is told from the perspective of the animals, and won Annaud the César Award for Best Director.
Roger Ebert described Guy Madden’s silent film “Brand Upon the Brain!” best when he wrote it could only be described as a mix between Edgar Allan Poe horror and Salvador Dalí surrealism. The plot concerns a man traveling through his own memories as he visits his estranged dying mother.
The minimal dialogue heard in Gus Van Sant’s controversial drama is entirely improvised by the teenage actors, and whatever lines are said are mostly mumbled. The director turns his camera into a voyeur of brutality. To understand the school shooters is to follow and study their every move.
Michelangelo Frammartino’s drama is a silent film about an elderly shepherd living out his final days in the hills of Calabria, Italy. The movie is presented in four phases, each focusing on the life and death of a living organism: A human, a goat, a plant, and a mineral. The result is a grand statement on life’s cyclical nature.
José Luis Guerín barely features any dialogue in this 84-minute dramatic mystery. The plot follows a helpless romantic as he makes his way through Strasbourg, France in search of a woman he met six years earlier. Guerín’s use of silence is key, forcing the viewer into the man’s seductive and enigmatic mission.
“Juha,” a black-and-white silent film made by Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki, updates Juhani Aho’s 18th century-set novel to the 1970s as it tells the story of a peasant woman who leaves her husband behind after falling in love with a city slicker. The film uses intertitles to communicate the dialogue to the viewer.
Esteban Sapir’s Argentinian drama is set in a nameless city where all of the citizens have lost their voices. Dialogue is used sparingly, with one of the only voices heard being that of a singer on television (which is a symbol of corruption). The family at the film’s center attempts to win back their voices, as Sapir crafts a loving homage to German Expressionism.
Watching Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff” is like being dropped in the middle of the desert in 1845 Oregon. The director’s story about 19th century settlers struggling to pass through the Oregon trail is told mostly through sweeping landscape shots, resulting in a film that forces the viewer to both observe and experience the conditions of its characters.
Charles Lane’s indie classic is a contemporary silent film that reimagines Charlie Chaplin’s famous “The Kid” in downtown New York. Shot in black-and-white, the film tells the story of a young African-American man who looks after a baby and searches for his mother. His quest comically leads him to chasing down the murderers of the baby’s father.
Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi astonishing Ukrainian drama follows a teenager navigating the hierarchy of his new school: A boarding school for deaf teenagers. The film features a cast made up of entirely deaf actors and is only told through sign language without any translated subtitles.
Sylvain Chomet’s animated French comedy relies almost entirely on music and pantomime to tell its story of an elderly woman who sets out on a mission to rescue her kidnapped grandson. The protagonist only communicates in sighs and grunts, but Chomet’s comic storytelling and unique animation style carry all of the expressive heavy-lifting.
Jonathan Glazer’s film tells the story of an alien (Scarlett Johansson) sent to earth to prey upon men, but it’s ultimate function is as an investigation of humanity. Glazer’s observant camera studies the alien as humanity sinks into her skin and changes her emotional perspective. He relies not on dialogue but on body movement, facial expressions, and the piercing strings of Mica Levi’s iconic score.