Soft & Quiet's True Story Makes The Horror Movie Even Scarier

Some of the best cinematic revelations of all time hinge on one single moment: the plot twist. While you've seen several of them, you've probably never seen one like the bombshell that drops around the 15-minute mark of "Soft & Quiet," one of 2022's best thrillers. The film centers around a group of unassuming women who meet up to discuss a shared issue.

That cause turns out to be white nationalism. It's a jaw-dropping reveal, especially because it isn't even teased in the film's trailer. Still, what viewers may find even more unsettling is that "Soft & Quiet" was inspired by a real-life event in which a Caucasian woman targeted a Black man simply for having the audacity to remind her of the rules.

In an interview with Forbes, writer-director Beth de Araújo discussed the inspiration for "Soft & Quiet." "I kept writing like five pages and throwing it out, and then the Amy Cooper video surfaced," the filmmaker recalled. "It really affected me in a way that most of these videos don't, where usually I get quite depressed and sort of debilitated by them. And this one – the manipulation made me so angry."

For those who are unfamiliar, the Amy Cooper video (via CNN) follows the titular dog walker as she's told by a nearby bird watcher, Christian Cooper, that her dog must be leashed in the area. From there, things escalate until Christian begins filming Amy as she calls the cops to say that she is "being threatened by an African-American man."

Clearly, the video struck a chord in Beth de Araújo, who imagined a meeting between six women who look normal in "Soft & Quiet." However, there's nothing normal about them, as they're working together to form a white nationalist newsletter and accost minorities in between dropping racial epithets and doing the Nazi salute in public.

It's incredibly jarring, and horrifically, the events unfold in real-time with an intensity that will leave you gasping for breath, grimly entranced by the rising tension. "It immediately clicked that I wanted to write a role where ['Soft & Quiet' star] Stefanie [Estes] would play a modern-day female White Supremacist," Araújo explained. "It just clicked from there. I ran the idea by her. She was quite nervous about it, and then I showed her the script once I had it done. She was incredibly brave to take on such a feat."

Considering how the six women at the film's center look like anyone you could pass in the grocery store or see at your kid's school, it's easy to see how the Amy Cooper video inspired a movie like "Soft & Quiet." Like Cooper, the women in Beth de Araújo's movie turn on a dime despite their unassuming appearances.

For instance, the scene in the store where they switch from causally shopping for snacks and wine to accosting and demeaning a pair of Asian Americans who enter stands out. Sequences like that help "Soft & Quiet" leave a mark because you do not see these women coming, and you almost certainly wouldn't see them coming in real life until it's too late. Much like "Get Out," it's because these people look so normal that they're so terrifying.

Especially in today's day and age, we've all seen one video after another of the kinds of harmful lies and racist rhetoric that can make its way into the lives of everyday citizens. While this may be more than familiar to us at this point, what makes "Soft & Quiet" memorable is that it unexpectedly leads viewers directly into one of these situations, where they're essentially witnessing a hate crime with frighteningly cold and grimly realistic results.