Somewhere Quiet

Olivia West Lloyd · 2023 · 98 minutes
November 11 · Regal Riviera · 8:30 p.m.

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Meg is trying to readjust to normalcy after surviving a traumatic kidnapping, but her sense of reality soon starts to deteriorate when she travels with her husband Scott to his family’s isolated compound. Things become even more tense when Scott’s cloying cousin Madelin arrives unannounced.

Shot in and around Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Somewhere Quiet is a dizzying pschological thriller–think Hitchcockian suspense as opposed to jump scares. The plot turns (creatively, wickedly) on two classic horror tropes: the “last girl,” which has been a staple of the genre at least since Sally rode away in the back of that pickup at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, bloodied and maniacal but still alive, and the “gaslighting” husband who covers up his crimes by slowly driving his wife insane. Indie icon Kentucker Audley brings a kind-eyed menace to the role of Scott, whose relationship with Madelin (Marin Ireland) borders on the perverse.

As Meg, Jennifer Kim quietly steals the show, somehow managing always to seem a reliable observer of the unreliable world around her. A long-time fan of horror films, writer-director Olivia Lloyd West uses the collaboration with Kim as an opportunity to dig into questions raised by the genre’s treatment of women. “I wanted to go with [the last girl] back to her mom’s house and see what it was like to wash all that blood off and be with her when she went to the grocery store,” Lloyd has said. As a result, Somewhere Quiet is smart, tense, and delightfully unnerving.