In the modern era, noise is constant and everywhere. Doesn’t matter if you live in urban, suburban, or rural areas, if you’ve got some kind of signal transmission, it produces sound, whether you can hear it or not. Recognizing the importance of quiet well before Wi-Fi and cell phones were more than science fiction dreams, the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) was established with the first of several telescopes was erected in 1958 and a dead zone for signals of roughly 35,000 sq. kilometers known locally as “The Quiet Zone” was established to protect the instruments from receiving interference from terrestrial sources. In their latest project, The End of Quiet, screening in the Documentary Competition section of Tribeca 2025, co-directors Kasper Bisgaard (Choka!) and Mikael Lypinski (Desert Coffee) explore the space of Green Bank, West Virginia, via its inhabitants, the resultant tale a meditation on interpersonal tangible connection, interstellar communication, and the impact of always-on digital information access.
A still from documentary THE END OF QUIET. Photo credit: Mikael Lypinski. Photo courtesy of Sonntag Pictures.
Some things are innately generational. Children born in 2015, for instance, are less likely to understand landlines and phone receivers as most people own cellphones; whereas individuals born in 1980 know exactly they are and how to use them (rotary or button dial). Likewise, children born in 2015 are less likely to understand event programming and the urgency of being in front of a television set at a specific time thanks to the wide-spread utilization of streaming services, accessible anytime with a few taps on a screen. But what if they weren’t? What if, like the residents of Green Bank, all technology was limited to what was available in the 1990s? What would you do for fun? How would you spend your time when you couldn’t navel gaze or doomscroll on the internet? How would you view the world and your place in it? These are but a few of the elements explored as Bisgaard and Lypinski eschew traditional talking head interviews for raw moments of life for seven residents, each with their own reasons for being there and reasons to want things to either change or stay the same.
A still from documentary THE END OF QUIET. Photo credit: Mikael Lypinski. Photo courtesy of Sonntag Pictures.
The End of Quiet is split into three parts: a prologue, “The Quietness,” and “The Noise.” None of the parts deviate in terms of execution, even as the information within them shifts. The first part establishes location and a few of the individuals that we’ll be following throughout the documentary. Bisgaard and Lypinski make interesting choices regarding the interviewees with the individual representing the work at GBO heard primarily in voiceover regardless of whether he’s on screen or not compared to the rest of the subjects shown speaking in the moments they are on camera. Additionally, at no point are any of the subjects given any contextual information regarding identity or relationships. Some things, like the young couple we meet early in the prologue, are easy to determine based on the pair holding hands, the physical intimacy making it clear that these aren’t platonic friends or siblings; rather, much like the GBO individual, we’re left to infer information, obvious or otherwise, instead of being informed. On the one hand, understanding who these people are, such as knowing their names, matters in the sense of making their contributions to the larger narrative specific; whereas, on the other hand, the absence of identity makes the corporeal forms we observe less important than what they say and do when we observe them.
This is, perhaps, where The End of Quiet gets the most interesting. Through the close-ups (tight or intense) of its subjects, Lypinski’s cinematography enables the audience to study each of the subjects, to see the lines on their faces, the way their eyes move and what they focus on, their body language, and tone, to get a clear a picture of who they are and how they feel about the words coming from their mouths. In the case of the grandfather and granddaughter who spend their time shooting, the cinematography captures their intimacy, their close connection and the fondness they have for each other as they shoot firearms on his property, targeting a collection of inert and explosive materials. In the first part, showing these two together, listening to the grandfather speak, one gets the sense of a wizened figure, filled with hope and a wider belief about his place in the universe. Later, in part two, when there’s been a shift over the course of a three-year jump between parts, the audience can’t help but think of the calm demeaner, the deep lines of aging on his forehead, and the previous looks of affection that now appear shifted by digital influence. This frequent zooming in begins to get the audience to feel strangely connected to the subjects as they discuss the mundanity of their lives, especially in the first part. In the second, some of the relationships are less deeply explored, leaving more questions with only conjecture to fill the empty spaces. At the same time, one can’t help but wonder if that’s part of the co-directors’ point in the over-arching narrative involving those who have access to digital services versus a life led in the past.
A still from documentary THE END OF QUIET. Photo credit: Mikael Lypinski. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival 2025.
Even if one considers the beautiful capturing of Green Bank’s surrounding nature or the lovely score by Uno Helmersson (The Remarkable Life of Ibelin) which helps develop and maintain a rather ponderous vibe for the whole of the documentary, by relying on the audience to fill in gaps, by not laying things out in a more direct manner, The End of Quiet ends up a touch hollow by its conclusion. For instance, the subject who moved from France to Green Bank in hopes of lessening her allergic reaction to radio waves becomes more of a warning than a person due to her unreliability as presented by the filmmakers. Is it because she’s always shown in her home, still disconnected from her husband, and without human companionship from the community? Considering that the Vietnam veteran we meet in part one lives a similar life of solitude (though he is shown working a counter at a convenience store) speaks quite happily about his quiet, uneventful life, by contrast, she appears as a prisoner within Green Bank, living in a cell of her own making. Is the documentary trying to point out that the more digital communication tools we create, flooding space with soundwaves, the more disconnected we, as people, become? Is it trying to say that, through the proliferation of advanced technology, we, as a specie, are potentially going to lose the ability to look upwards and communicate with intelligent life? Is it suggesting that the more access to information we have, the less content we become? There’s certainly a line of thinking suggested in the bits and pieces we learn about the subjects from part one to part two, but nothing is concretely identified, thereby creating a vacuum through which the audience must decide for themselves what it is the filmmakers seek to proclaim.
A still from documentary THE END OF QUIET. Photo credit: Mikael Lypinski. Photo courtesy of Sonntag Pictures.
For all the questions, for all the reasons why one shouldn’t be compelled, by spending any time ruminating on The End of Quiet, one realizes that the questions may be the point. GBO’s entire purpose is to look upward and it comes at the cost of its citizenry being forced to exist without certain technology. It’s clear from the doc that something shifts in the three years between “The Quietness” and “The Noise” that enables more frequencies access to the Green Bank arrive, even if we’re never told what and its cost to the GBO. We are, however, shown a cost to the populace, whether they’d acknowledge it or not. Shot amid the beautiful landscape of Green Bank, Kasper Bisgaard and Mikael Lypinski present a town out of time who may have been better off outside of modernity, not just for the woman potentially allergic to radio waves and mechanical transmissions who finds herself with less ground to explore, but for the ways in which this access changes us as people. A change without hope of reclamation.
Screening during Tribeca Film Festival 2025.
For more information, head to the official Tribeca Film Festival The End of Quiet webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
Share this:
Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
Leave a Reply