The Quiet Room

Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but he neglected to mention that some of them are tedious. A nameless 7-year-old (Chloe Ferguson) stops talking in a small act of rebellion against her parents, whose marriage is collapsing. Writer-director Rolf de Heer takes the wrong road from the start, forcing the narrative into the narrow, claustrophobic point of view of a child whose silence belies an inner life that's a wall-to-wall jumble of words, naïve judgments and opinions. De Heer's meticulous recreation of life at 7 -- the minutes spent staring at goldfish in a tank, the preoccupation with rhyming, the reluctance to get dressed ...