‘Soft & Quiet’ Details White Supremacy at the Cost of its Victims

This is especially a shame, considering how well the rest of the movie works. Its opening scene draws its power from a genuinely hive-inducing performance by Stefanie Estes, who anchors most of the film’s intensity. She plays elementary school teacher Emily, a tall, slender, prim-and-proper white woman aggrieved by her inability to get pregnant, whose frustrations are directed at the school’s non-white cleaning staff. As de Araújo’s camera follows Emily around the school, it captures both her private moments, defined by suspicious glances and stewing entitlement, as well her more public interactions with a young student and his mother, in which she disguises (and justifies) her animosities against the cleaners as well-meaning concern for the children’s safety. It’s an immediate cinematic thesis statement: by maintaining this unyielding focus, de Araújo seeks to turn her lens on the weaponization of white femininity, and the ugliness it conceals.

It’s an immediate cinematic thesis statement: by maintaining this unyielding focus, de Araújo seeks to turn her lens on the weaponization of white femininity, and the ugliness it conceals.

The languid camera slowly tracks Emily—homemade cherry pie in hand—along a suburban forest trail. Coupled with Miles Ross’ enveloping music, which builds as we follow Emily, the isolated setting enhances the film’s sense of foreboding. This sets the stage for a slow-but-steady de-mystification of the layers of white supremacy when it’s disguised by notions of western femininity, as something to be protected and preserved at all costs. The meeting Emily has organized is held in an equally isolated setting, a wooden church attic turned into a makeshift tea party, wherein half a dozen participants sit around to eat and chat. It’s quaint and casual, but as the camera makes its way around the gathering amid seemingly innocent conversations (topics like husbands, children, dating, and the likes), it reveals deeply disconcerting hallmarks of white supremacy scattered around room—words and symbols with which some of the women are mildly uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to object.

Cinematographer Greta Zozula and first assistant camera Jon Cooper deserve kudos for maintaining not just focus and framing, but rhythm, as the women take turns introducing themselves in close-up while letting their frustrations fly. Some participants, like the polite and soft-spoken Alice (Rebekah Wiggins), are a lot like Emily: more financially well-off wives and mothers who’ve adopted a pristine, off-white color scheme resembling an upper-class, Fall season Instagram look. They also seem much more accustomed to these spaces and meetings; they know exactly how to Trojan-horse their grievances against non-white communities while appealing to more “mainstream” sentiments. The film’s title refers to one of their newsletter strategies, but also, subtly, to the dainty and vulnerable disguises in which they move through the world.

There are other women at the meeting, too, some younger newcomers—like bubbly out-of-towner Leslie (Olivia Luccardi)—who wear darker and more casual clothing, and who aren’t quite as steeped in the ongoing “culture war,” but who have been searching for ways to vent their frustrations against non-white coworkers and the likes. They’re either “just asking questions” or “just stating facts,” but they’re doing so both without larger context, and in a space rife with confirmation bias, which allows them to open up and be more explicit about which ethnic groups they dislike.

And then, there is the film’s secret weapon: Kim (Dana Millican), a messy-haired, middle class mother who rides the line between the two aforementioned groups. She knows Emily and Alice, but she doesn’t feel at one with them, and she’s far more explicit when it comes to redirecting her economic frustrations against a litany of targets (for instance, the “Jew banks” who won’t give her a loan). However, what binds these women across borders of money, age and experience is their whiteness, something they know full well without having to state explicitly.

Millican’s performance pairs nicely with Estes’, in that it’s a less composed, less disguised version of the same duality—which makes it just as terrifying. Her oscillation between private and public self is more extreme, and rougher around the edges. She runs a nearby liquor store, where the women decide to stop to pick up some wine before reconvening at Emily’s house, and it’s here that sisters Anne (Melissa Paulo) and Lily (Cissy Ly) enter their sights. The duo are customers like any other, but the white women are caught up in a charged headspace that makes them feed off each other’s energies. Kim is immediately aggressive towards the sisters—whom she and the other white women tower over—but as soon they push back, Millican flips a switch, turning Kim’s aggression into manipulative helplessness, playing the victim of a circumstance she helped create in the first place. Her perceived innocence is a get-out-of-jail-free card, and she knows it.

In an act of petty vengeance, the group follows Anne and Lily home, concocting half-baked plans that they each express from a place of anger and indignation (the film never ceases to be a precise performance piece). However, when things finally go off the rails, it’s more a result of happenstance and coincidence than active intent. In the moments when the group does inflict harm upon the sisters, the camera continues to circle the action, but is left floating in a strange, noncommittal space where it captures neither the full impact of the violence at hand, nor the full humanity of Anne and Lily.

Instead, the frame whips back and forth between nearly every character, trying desperately to capture all their perspectives at once, yielding little more than visual and tonal chaos. While this matches the unpredictable nature of the scene, and the suddenness with which it erupts, it transforms the film from a detailed scrutinization into a distant, discordant observation—from a work whose unpleasantness is challenging, and necessary, to one that is simply too visually and aurally unpleasant to connect with. The form itself becomes unpleasant, rather than capturing an unpleasant story.

The intensity quickly dissipates, but rather than being replaced by lingering horror—a tough task, when the film’s most grotesque acts of violence are presented completely off-screen—its growing tensions are replaced simply by plot musings, as the white women try to cover their tracks, and the camera follows them from place to place as nothing in particular unfolds, evolves or builds from an emotional standpoint. It feels almost mechanical, and completely at odds with the way the rest of the movie maintains an intriguing balance between internal and external—between what these women really think, and how they disguise their thoughts. When de Araújo finally translates those thoughts into action, these externalizations feel disconnected from the perspectives that Soft & Quiet has spent the previous hour carefully exposing. Its climax could have belonged to any film about any other rowdy group; by the end, their hatred no longer feels specific, nor do their victims.

de Araújo is a mixed-race Asian woman herself, so the film is as much a condemnation of white supremacy and white womanhood as it is a public act of mourning.

The story comes from a genuine and intimate place. The idea came to de Araújo after witnessing the viral video of Amy Cooper, a white woman who controversially called the police on a Black man, Christian Cooper (no relation), for birdwatching in Central Park. On the very first day of production, six East Asian women were targeted and shot dead in an Atlanta hate-crime, sparking the modern “Stop Asian Hate” movement. Like the two fictitious sisters, de Araújo is a mixed-race Asian woman herself, so the film is as much a condemnation of white supremacy and white womanhood as it is a public act of mourning. However, it’s one that also suffers from the limitations of its own appearance.

The final half hour loses sight of the story’s realistic, lived-in tensions, replacing them with wholly imaginary circumstances that don’t feel rooted in the present moment. The project has lofty technical ambitions—it’s no doubt a product of immense coordination—but its emotional payoffs are stifled by a single-minded adherence to its aesthetic. The one-shot conceit works to maintain quiet tensions, like in scenes where Emily and her makeshift sisterhood are fleshed out in real time. However, when the camera turns towards the people they target, it rarely affords them the same nuance, even in passing. Any inkling of their humanity gets buried beneath chaos. A more traditionally edited film (or at least, a more restrained, more carefully considered climax) might have better served de Araújo’s narrative purpose; the film deftly exposes the dynamic between belief and façade, but obscures the grueling human toll of modern far-right movements.

The problem isn’t just a matter of optics; a story that seeks to understand white supremacy, and the many faces it wears, can be just as valuable as one that fleshes out its victims. However, the film’s fatal flaw is its near-total breakdown between form and intent by the time the credits roll. The actions of banal evil, presented in plain sight, seldom result in the contextualizing or real pain or violence, or in the unearthing of some latent truth about its perpetrators. Instead, real anguish is turned into cacophonous noise—into window-dressing emanation from just off-screen. The sisters are afforded little by way of actual personhood beyond their victimization, turning Soft & Quiet into a deeply distasteful experience without the requisite reason or reflection in the end. The fine brush with which de Araújo paints her villains is a necessary exposé of white womanhood. It’s extremely effective—right up until the point when it isn’t.