"The Quiet" is one of those movies where you’d be surprised if someone didn’t kill themselves before it’s all over.

Spoiler alert: Someone does. With its visual motifs, recurring snippets of dialogue and behaviors whose meanings change as they’re repeated, "The Quiet" is a literary sort of movie, a tragedy about a family whose members live in a fog (literally - the interior of their house is hazier than a graveyard scene on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer").

There’s narcotized Mom (Edie Falco, who could not be better), angerholic Dad (Martin Donovan), nasty daughter No. 1 (Elisha Cuthbert) and disconnected daughter No. 2 (Camilla Belle). Each of these people pretends to be someone he or she isn’t, and each pretends not to know something he or she does.

If you tell a lie often enough, "The Quiet" suggests, you begin to believe it yourself. The movie means to show how dangerous those lies can be, and if that makes "The Quiet" sound like one of those the-suburbs-are-a-soul-deadening-place movies such as "American Beauty," there is a resemblance.

But "The Quiet" doesn’t have the wit of "American Beauty," and, in fact, what’s most interesting about it is its weirdly blank haziness. Forget about the suicidal characters - you’ll feel like you took an overdose of sleeping pills.

This neutral quality comes from a few places: the movie’s own unsureness - it’s almost a thriller, almost a satire, almost an update of "Long Day’s Journey Into Night." And there’s also its weird instance of miscasting (Belle, one of the loveliest young women on the planet, is repeatedly referred to as ugly). And, finally, there’s its key theme, which is that you have to admit you’re uncertain before you can figure out the truth.