5 Action Films with Almost No Dialogue—And Why They Work

I'm a silent film fan who grew up with the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, so I've always been fascinated by cinema's ability to tell stories without words. But there's something particularly striking about modern action films that choose silence over exposition.

When you strip away dialogue, it forces the audience to focus more on what the film is conveying onscreen and how all the elements of a production work in tandem to tell a story.

In honor of the Sisu: Road to Revenge trailer's release, we decided to dive into examples of movies with very little spoken dialogue.

These five action films are a kind of return to a simpler time, when all audiences had to go on were the tableaus on screen and the occasional title card.

All Is Lost

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I was just thinking of this daring film (and its score from Alex Ebert) recently. It's one of the strongest examples of action filmmaking without words.

Robert Redford stars as a man with no name on a boat at sea, when he finds that he's taking on water after colliding with a drifting cargo container. Very little is said in this film. Redford is entirely alone. I can imagine the draw of a challenging role like this, which Redford confirmed.

He said at the New York Film Festival in 2013, "When I got the script from J.C., there was a lot of stuff I was impressed with and attracted to—no dialogue, bold—but it was detailed in a way that I knew that this person knew what they were doing and had a strong vision" (via The Playlist).

J.C. Chandor's survival thriller gets an exceptional performance, which carries the entire film alongside its dangerous visuals. Sometimes, a simple concept like a man's will to survive a sinking ship is all a movie needs.

A Quiet Place

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This horror film takes the concept to its logical extreme by making silence a survival mechanism. The film as a whole only has roughly 25 lines of voiced dialogue. I remember checking out this script before the film came out, and saw that writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had used some of the available page space to include illustrations.

These characters refrain from talking for a good reason since, in the movie's post-apocalyptic world, any kind of sound attracts deadly aliens. In this case, the silence helped create an atmosphere of constant tension.

But it also made the words that are spoken land much harder.

"Early on, we really wanted the script to play silently, all the way up to the spoken words at the end of the movie—John's character saying 'I love you' to his children," Woods told ScreenCraft. "The hope was that, in a movie where there's no dialogue, those words would have that much more power."

Quest for Fire

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Here's a deep cut that eliminated modern language from the film entirely. Jean-Jacques Annaud's prehistoric adventure tells the story of tribespeople trying to conquer fire using only primitive communication, like expressions and grunts.

The approach might sound gimmicky, but the film was critically acclaimed and won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.

Sisu

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Imagine a larger-than-life character who almost never speaks. We've seen it a few times, but in the case of Sisu's Aatami (Jorma Tommila), he has two lines of dialogue in the film's entire 90-minute runtime. Both of them occur at the film's end.

Writer/director Jalmari Helander said of the silent protagonist, "It was really interesting and a good learning process of how [the] movie really works. It was always asking the question: 'How can you solve the problems and tell your story without explaining it in a stupid dialogue?' In the beginning, it was really hard, because, of course, I'm used to writing dialogue that explains something. But when you don't have it, you just have to invent it in cinematic ways" (via But Why Tho).

This approach can force you to get creative.

The Shallows

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This is another survival story with minimal dialogue. Blake Lively is mostly reactionary in an isolated setting as she tries to survive, with just an inner monologue to connect with the audience.

Jaume Collet-Serra's 2016 thriller is a simple but compelling creature feature, and the director thinks this benefits the character development.

"In The Shallows, there isn't a lot of room—there isn't anybody for her to talk to or react to," Collet-Serra told Little White Lies. "I wanted it to feel real. We put a lot of work into that character, building her slowly through the movie, and it paid off. The audience feels like they discover the character, instead of having it telegraphed, which closes them off to her."

Are there any we left out? Make sure to tell us your favs!