Dot's fate is decided, for the time being, when she's taken in by her godfather Paul Deer (Martin Donovan). His family is in pieces, just like his Connecticut house: Sheets of plastic and starkly empty spaces indicate the redesign undertaken by professional interior decorator Mrs. Deer, Olivia (Edie Falco).

As Dot sits silently at the dinner table, Deer daughter Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) and fellow cheerleader Michelle (Katy Mixon) roll their eyes and call her "nut," "retarded girl" and "freak." Dot reads lips, and though Paul makes feeble efforts to shush his daughter, it's already clear, in the early moments of The Quiet, that he's not really running his household.

As in director Jamie Babbit's last feature, 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader, secrets lurk beneath glossy suburban surfaces, the sort of surfaces so frequently embodied by cheerleaders. (When Nina isn't wearing her cheerleading outfit, she's ironing or cleaning it.) But, viewed more or less from Dot's perspective, the Deer family's supposedly deep dark mysteries are egregiously obvious, eventually reduced to stiff caricatures.

Furious at her odious husband, Olivia pops pills, forcing him to tend to her; "My hip still hurts at night," she says, by way of explaining that she's perpetually in pain. When she passes out against the wall of her unfinished living room, Paul carries her to the bedroom, where she complains about his bringing Dot into the house: "I'm incredibly fucking self-aware," she announces, challenging his assumption that he can do as he likes under her pill-fogged eyes.

It's not hard to figure out that Paul's secret has to do with Nina: Between her basement bedroom and his acute attention to her cheerleader uniform, the only mystery is how Dot is so slow to understand. And while Donovan brings a welcome confusion and even complexity to the part, Paul's straight-up villainy is only the most overt evil in a film that's pretty much teeming with it.

The girls, on the other hand, are more discomforting, as they simultaneously want to please their impossible parents (dead and alive), fit in with their creepily lustful peers (including basketball star Shawn Ashmore), and maintain independent identities, even as being "invisible" would indeed seem the most effective means of survival in their terminally nasty environment. Dot and Nina's route to mutual understanding is slow and not a little convoluted: First they compete, then reconcile, then figure their ways out of their distinct but related traumas. Surviving in the dire 'burbs, the girls endure movie-of-the-week melodrama and horror movie abuses. By the time they come to terms, they look as exhausted as you feel.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)