Pro Tip: You have to see the hands for ASL. Another Pro-Tip: Silence isn't scary

Rating: 3/10 (6 January 2019)

I hated this film from basically the first second it was on. My biggest issue is not having to make a sound isn't all that scary or tense (even if failure means death). Silence becomes scary when it is unexpected and you expect there to be sound (again). The film treats silence as this horribly oppressive thing and I largely found the atmosphere relaxing in the film (and in real life). It is true the creatures add some spice to the quiet game but honestly the plotting of their behavior was so rote that the film couldn't engage me. This film just isn't scary and that is a huge problem for a creature feature. To be fair a few sequences, especially towards the end, were moderately suspenseful. Alas it was too late.
My other big problem was the filming of the dialog scenes routinely cut the ASL apart and made it impossible to follow it on a grammatical level by largely hiding hand shape and movement. I don't understand why the cast/crew went through so much trouble to bother to learn ASL if they filmed it in that way. (I can hear) As a person who vaguely knows ASL this issue is highly distracting and wrecked any chance I had to relate to the characters.
Lastly, while I get there are psychologically plausible explanations for why the couple decided to let a certain thing take its course their exact reasons are left utterly unclear. The entire time I was wondering why they didn't use readily available drug store supplies. I wished the film took 10 minutes to explain that in one scene. But alas it didn't.
In the end this film was hugely disappointing to me.