Dead Silence (James Wan, 2007)

By Sarah Holbrook.

This review contains big spoilers.

“Beware the stare of Mary Shaw. She had no children, only dolls. And if you see her in your dreams, do not ever, ever scream.”

The tale of local ventriloquist Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts) and her penchant for removing the tongues of her screaming victims silenced the children of Raven’s Fair at bedtime. Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) is followed by the myth even as an adult when he returns to this apartment one night to find his wife brutally murdered just hours after a ventriloquist dummy was delivered to their home. Desperate to prove his innocence to the annoying Detective Jim Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), Jamie returns to his childhood home town to put the legend to rest.

Jamie quickly realises that Mary Shaw is out to eradicate the remaining Ashen family whose ancestors were responsible for her death many years ago following the disappearance of young Michael Ashen who called Mary’s bluff during her ventriloquism show. Jamie builds bridges with his father Edward (Bob Gunton) and his new wife Ella (Amber Valletta) to work out the mystery before their extinction.

Dead Silence works on the basis that people are fundamentally scared of those inanimate objects that appear to be too real. Mary Shaw’s creation, Billy the dummy, is one of those objects. Brought to you by the gang who delivered the successful Saw saga, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, anyone who read R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps collection like I did will instantly recognise an updated Night of the Living Dummy (1993) whilst revelling in a throwback to a more classic era of horror and stageplay where trickery delighted the audience – much like this film will try to do its viewers.

The “I’m innocent, the dummy did it” plot is cliché but it works here because a creepy doll appearing here, there and everywhere is scary and the film refuses to resort to the tricks that virtually made the Saw series. Freakish set pieces, deadly silences, the fact that Mary Shaw requests for her corpse to be made up like a dummy and buried with her 101 other puppets just casts gruesome imagery that doesn’t need glorious effects. The characters aren’t exactly meaty but they’re fleshed out as much possible and I must admit that one glad when Wahlberg choked it with his obsessive shaving acting as pointless ‘characterisation’.

That said, even though this film offered a twist ending that I didn’t predict, it left me wanting for the same reasons that Captivity (Roland Joffé, 2007) had a few weeks ago. Essentially, I encountered another problem with an alternate ending. Perhaps I should just stop watching them? On one hand they’re offering me an alternate experience but what I saw here offered the film a plausibility that the film makers chose to cut. It frustrates me that could-have-been-better films are being butchered and given a half hearted release that don’t stand alone without the extras which, surely, negates their entire purpose?

BIG SPOILERS AHEAD!

In the original release, Jamie finds his father dead in his wheelchair; his back has been hollowed out and replaced with a mechanism used in ventriloquist dummies. Flashbacks remind us that every time we’ve seen Edward Ashen, he has looked like death incarnate and his doting wife has attended to his side. After finding one of Mary’s scrapbooks, Jamie sees that Mary strove to create the perfect doll (cue picture of Ella Ashen) who Mary could possess to lure Jamie back to the family. Of course, Jamie eventually screams thus enabling her to cut out his tongue and become one of the puppets. In the alternate version, Ella was a real person and a real victim of domestic abuse at the hand of Edward. After being pushed down the stairs Ella miscarried and, desperate for revenge, she offered her body to the ghost of Mary Shaw who was also looking to exact revenge on the Ashen family where the original ending plays out with a little bit of extra gorey footage. Writing this now, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal but it really was. The original ending wasn’t as clear cut as I’ve made out, it was… fluffy. It was just a bit convoluted where as the alternate ending was grounded in a sense of realism and not entirely caught up in a world full of dolls. Either way, the film worked because it played on fundamental fears and entertained me for ninety minutes which is all I asked of it.