Five days of silence

Tranquillum House’s five-day noble silence is both a restriction on communication and a change in attention: guests surrender their phones, live without their usual digital routines, and encounter one another in the quiet. The experience gives Jessica a clearer view of the way sudden lottery wealth strained her marriage, while Ben’s longing for his phone and his later experience of intimacy without an ulterior goal expose what the retreat’s silence can interrupt—and what it can make newly perceptible.

The Digital Detox

At arrival, Yao tells Frances that guests must hand over all electronic devices. Frances switches off her phone and gives it to him; the enforced submission feels oddly familiar, like the moment on an airplane when the seatbelt sign puts attendants in charge. Yao calls her officially off the grid and promises the device will be kept safe. He says some guests find the digital detox one of the most enjoyable parts of their stay and predicts they may not want their phones back. Frances tries to imagine herself transformed after ten days, but that future feels difficult to picture. The exchange frames disconnection as part of the retreat’s promise of personal change, even as the institution controls when guests can regain access to their devices.

Missing the Phone

The absence of phones shapes Jessica’s nights as well as the retreat’s group activities. After being woken and brought outside, she remembers that she had been unable to sleep beside Ben. At home, she would normally pick up her phone and scroll through Instagram and Pinterest until she felt tired. Without it, she cannot fall back on that familiar routine. Under the stars, she imagines photographing her scarlet toenails with Ben’s feet and posting the image with a string of retreat-themed hashtags. Even the imagined post carries an awareness of presentation: she thinks one hashtag would make her look intellectual and spiritual, guarding against seeming superficial on social media. The silence thus exposes not just a missing convenience but the habits of self-display woven into her ordinary use of a phone.

Clarity and the Marriage

When Jessica speaks during the retreat’s noble silence, she says it has been clarifying. Before arriving, she explains, social media occupied her attention and left constant chatter in her head; she demonstrates that mental noise with a hand opening and closing beside her ear. She traces the couple’s trouble to winning the lottery: the money changed everything and badly unsettled them. She had expected to keep their win quiet, but they changed their minds. Her account makes the retreat’s silence a context in which a private source of marital strain becomes speakable, even though the silence itself is supposed to limit conversation.

Jessica’s disclosure draws questions from the other guests, including Frances’s curiosity about how the couple learned they had won. Masha redirects the discussion rather than letting it turn into a story about the lottery. Ben then gives a more restrained account: the silence has been fine, he is unsure what the guests are achieving, the food is better than expected, and he misses his new car. When Tony asks what kind of car, Ben names a Lamborghini with marked tenderness. Jessica’s reflection casts the lottery as a cause of upheaval; Ben’s attachment to the car shows how wealth also persists in the concrete objects and comforts he misses.

Ben and Jessica in the Retreat

For Ben, the lack of a phone is not the only unfamiliar feature of the retreat. After he and Jessica share prolonged kisses in front of other guests, he recognizes that the experience feels different from adolescent or drunken kissing: it is not simply a step toward sex, but something valued for its own sake. He admits to himself that his first experience of drugs has been incredible and wonders whether this is what his sister destroyed her life for. The thought complicates the retreat’s effect: the experience opens a new form of pleasure, but also brings the possibility of craving it again. He asks himself whether he would steal to repeat it, leaving the question unresolved.

Surveillance and Reconnection

The retreat’s withdrawal from ordinary communication does not mean that its guests are beyond observation. When they are confined in the studio, Jessica notices a small security camera with a flashing red light above the blank television screen. Frances recalls that Yao mentioned a security intercom system. The detail qualifies the idea of being off the grid: guests have lost access to their own devices while the house retains its means of watching and communicating with them.

After the group’s confinement, the boundary between retreat and outside world falls away. Zoe retrieves wine she had smuggled from her bedroom, Frances finds six more bottles of presumably uncollected contraband in a room behind reception, and Ben locates the guests’ mobile phones. They reconnect and find that little has happened in the preceding week: a sporting scandal, a Kardashian marriage breakup, and a natural disaster. Ben uses his phone to play music and becomes the group’s DJ, taking requests across generations and genres. The phones return not as isolated tools for scrolling but as part of a shared evening of music, food, dancing, and tears—a collective reconnection that contrasts with the silence and separation of the retreat.