“Soft & Quiet” continues to escalate once that pie hits the table, from veiled references to “urban” kids to racial slurs to overt acts of intimidation and violence. Her voice trembles when she asks her husband, “Do you want me to look at you like a f-, babe?” using an anti-gay slur to bully him into accompanying her on a dark errand midway through the film. She uses white supremacist ideas about gender and femininity as weapons as well, leveraging the sexism and homophobia of the movement to avoid responsibility for her actions. She’s knowingly bringing together disillusioned women and indoctrinating them into white supremacist talking points, molding them into useful soldiers in her imagined race war. While impulsive ex-con Leslie ( Olivia Luccardi) is the one who tips the afternoon’s proceedings into the hate-crime territory, throughout the film Emily emerges as a truly terrifying, even evil, figure. And de Araújo systematically presents each of them, words that will later be destroyed by her characters’ actions. These catchphrases will be familiar to anyone who’s been at all politically engaged over the past five years or so. They’re just defending their way of life. And the rationales they present for their bigoted views run a similar gamut, evoking “common sense,” “pride in one’s heritage,” and “reverse racism.” Black Lives Matter started it, they argue.

It’s not, but they play it off as one.Įach of the members of Emily’s nascent far-right women’s group represents a different face of white supremacy: The radicalized punk, the bitter Boomer, the homeschooling housewife, the legacy racist. Emily sets her pie down on the table and lifts the wrapper for a shocking reveal: She’s carved a swastika into the upper crust. Amid this domesticated crew are two younger women, both of them in hoodies with piercings and dyed hair. She walks over to a nearby church, where she hugs and greets a gaggle of similarly put-together white ladies dressed in Old Navy separates. She leaves the school where she works, clutching a homemade cherry pie wrapped in foil. De Araújo’s film underlines this point, following a seemingly ordinary kindergarten teacher named Emily ( Stefanie Estes) through an afternoon in her life.

Wolf Spell by M.R. Polish