Review of The End of Quiet (2025)
Seen in 2026.
People at odds with digitalization live in the regulatory shadow of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. A radio astronomer explains why Wi-Fi, smartphones and other wireless gadgets are banned here as a general rule. A middle-aged woman thinks she has an electromagnetic hypersensitivity to “microwaves”, so she likes the rules, but still feels sick. An elderly man who says he hasn’t been to the doctor in 25 years also likes it, then dies, remembered by another old man who falls deeper into his obsession with guns and Internet propaganda about the world outside collapsing. Meanwhile, a new generation grows up wondering what the scientists are really doing, and what the world is like beyond the quiet zone.
The scouting work is good and so is the cinematography, but even a documentary about the loss of quiet in our society needs dramaturgy. This one fails to find the contours of its subject matter. It devolves to parallel portraits of ordinary people, so non-judgemental that it can’t explain anything about them. The middle-aged woman is not really hypersensitive to microwaves, but the filmmakers either don’t know this or don’t care enough about it to insert an expert opinion. The gun nut wears a Punisher flag, a symbol commonly associated with right-wing hate groups, and the filmmakers do show him having an authoritarian outburst against his granddaughter, but they do nothing to show what drives him.