Seriously—do you really want to see a movie about a guy who rapes his daughter over and over while his wife is passed out on pills down the hall? Of course not. That's why The Quiet fronts as if it's about Dot (Camilla Belle), a deaf, mute teenager in high school. But don't be fooled! While Dot gets more screen time than anyone else in The Quiet, it's still really about a father screwing his cheerleader daughter.

Deaf Dot appeared on the Deer family doorstep just weeks before our story starts up. Though comatose rabbits have more personality, the Deers, Olivia (Edie Falco) and Paul (Martin Donovan), take her in for reasons never fully explained. The Deer family is a mess: Mom's a pillhead, and Dad can't stop his late-night visits to 17-year-old Nina's (Elisha Cuthbert) room. Nina hates Dot and treats her with immense cruelty. (Because her dad's screwing her, remember?) Eventually, Nina starts turning to Dot as a deaf confidante, saying things like, "I love sucking my daddy's dick"—which she presumably can't hear. Later, when Dot has some sweet deaf-mute sex, the guy rolls off her and starts chatting about jacking off four times a day. Hey—wouldn't it be crazy if Dot wasn't deaf after all and could hear all this stuff? Just saying.

I suppose it's possible to make a decent film about somebody raping his progeny. But in The Quiet, incest is used simply because it's a Big Topic—not because the director or writers had anything in particular to say about it. The result is simply a 96-minute movie about a guy dorking his daughter. How swell.