109 min | PG-13 | March 5, 2021 | Lionsgate
A boy lands on a colony world where every man’s thoughts pour out loud as visible Noise, and there are no women left. Then a girl crashes from the sky, the only silent mind on the planet. The setup hands you a great movie. This is not it.
Todd Hewitt grows up in Prentisstown, a frontier settlement on a distant colony planet where a phenomenon called the Noise broadcasts every man’s thoughts as a visible, audible cloud. He believes the women all died and that he is one of the last survivors of a failing world. Then Viola Eade survives a scout-ship crash and walks into his town with a mind he cannot hear. Doug Liman builds the film around a strong idea about masculinity with no privacy, a world where men cannot lie to each other or to themselves. The execution buries that idea under a flat chase and never lets it breathe.
Tom Holland plays Todd as a jumpy, overeager kid whose Noise constantly outs his crush and his fear, and the visual-thought gimmick turns his performance into a stream of repeated catchphrases. Daisy Ridley plays Viola as guarded and watchful, and the script gives her almost nothing to do beyond run and react. The two actors share no real chemistry, so the central bond reads as plot mechanics instead of attraction. Mads Mikkelsen plays Mayor Prentiss with a cold, controlling stillness and weaponizes his own Noise to dominate the town. He is the most interesting thing on screen, and the film keeps cutting away from him to chase Todd and Viola through the woods.
Liman directs from a script by Patrick Ness and Christopher Ford, adapted from Ness’s own novel. The Noise is the entire conceptual engine, and the visual effect rendering it as a swirling orange haze around each man’s head looks cheap and grows monotonous within the first act. Liman shoots the wilderness in drab gray-green daylight that drains the alien world of any strangeness. The editing betrays the heavy reshoots, cutting around performances and stranding scenes that start an idea and abandon it. The pacing is a constant forward sprint that never pauses long enough to develop the world it keeps insisting is fascinating.
This is a film with a premise that should write itself and a cast that should sell it. It wastes both. The Noise concept asks real questions about what men become when they cannot hide, and the movie answers none of them because it is too busy moving Todd and Viola from one location to the next. What remains is a colorless chase wrapped around a great idea that nobody on screen is allowed to think about.