dead silence

Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) and his wife Lisa (Laura Regan) receive a mysterious ventriloquist doll in the mail, "Billy", in an unmarked package. Jamie and Lisa wonder who would have sent the doll. Lisa then remembers a poem she knew when she was younger, about a woman named Mary Shaw. Jamie disregards this and leaves to get dinner; he returns to discover Lisa is dead with her tongue ripped out, and Billy lying on the floor near her body. Detective Jim Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) suspects Jamie of the murder, but there is no evidence against him. Jamie discovers that Billy belonged to Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts), a ventriloquist from his hometown of Ravens Fair.

Returning to the town for Lisa's funeral, he first confronts his estranged father about Mary Shaw. Jamie's father is wheelchair-bound with a new wife, Ella (Amber Valletta), who takes care of him. His father and Ella remind him of the children's poem, regarding Shaw and her penchant for cutting out her victims' tongues. Jamie leaves his father's home, warning Ella that his father is a monster. After Lisa's funeral, Jamie wanders into an old cemetery, where he finds Shaw's grave and those of her puppets. Marion (Joan Heney), the mortician's senile wife, warns him of the danger of Shaw's puppets, and he realizes he should rebury Billy. He does so, only to find the puppet in his room later, accompanied by Lipton — who dug the puppet back up in the belief that it is evidence that Jamie is trying to conceal —, still not convinced of Jamie's innocence. Jamie tells him about the poem, but Lipton is skeptical. The next morning, Jamie steals Billy from the detective, and brings him to the mortician, Henry, who finally tells him about Mary Shaw.

Shaw was a famous ventriloquist whose ambition was to make the perfect puppet. One night, at a performance attended by Henry, a young boy named Michael (Steven Taylor) heckled her, claiming that he could see Mary's lips moving. Mary quickly rebuffed this by presenting herself and Billy talking at the same time, and impressed the entire audience. Michael went missing shortly after. While his body was never found, Shaw was blamed, and the village murdered her by cutting her tongue out. Her final wish was to turn her body into a ventriloquist's puppet and to be buried with her 101 puppets. Henry, at a very young age, wandered into his fathers mortuary and accidentally knocked the coffin over. Shaw's body came to life and she began approaching Henry. He survived because he covered his mouth to keep from screaming; Mary can only kill her victims when they scream. Henry's father then burst into the room, and discovered Henry cowering in the corner and Shaw's body on the floor.

Jamie investigates the theater and finds Shaw's dressing room. He discovers an old book with plans to make the perfect puppet. Jamie confronts his father and learns that the missing boy was his great-uncle. His father tells him that the boy's family murdered Shaw by forcing her to scream and then cut out her tongue. The men involved were then killed off one by one, found with their tongues ripped out. Their wives, children, and children's children all suffered the same fate; Jamie's father deliberately drove Jamie away to try and spare him from that fate. His father then tells him Shaw will come back for them. Lipton tells Jamie that he exhumed Shaw's puppets' graves and that all of them are missing. Jamie then receives a phone call from Henry, telling him to go to the theater, when in truth Henry had just been murdered by Mary Shaw; when she takes her victims' tongues, she acquires their voices.

With the detective following close behind, Jamie returns to the theater and Shaw's living quarters. Discovering a hidden back room, they find the body of Michael Ashen, murdered by Mary Shaw, strung up like a marionette, and 100 of Shaw's puppets. Suddenly, one of the dolls begins talking to them. The doll, possessed by Shaw, tells them she wants to silence those who silenced her, and that she killed Lisa because she was pregnant. Shaw herself appears behind the doll, but Lipton shoots the doll and she disappears. She then begins materializing via the other dolls. After setting the room on fire, they run from the theater with Shaw's ghost chasing them. When the catwalk in which they are running collapses, Shaw kills Lipton in mid-fall after he screams. Jamie escapes as the theater burns down, destroying all of Shaw's dolls, putting an end to her reign of terror.

After he drives away, Jamie realizes that Billy is the only remaining puppet, and that the only way to get rid of Shaw is to destroy him. He goes to Henry, with who he had left Billy, only to discover that he is dead with his tongue ripped out. After Marion tells Jamie that his father took the doll, he returns to his father's house to destroy Billy. When he arrives, Mary Shaw reappears, but is forced to retreat when Jamie throws Billy into the fireplace. Jamie finds his father in his wheelchair, staring blankly. As he approaches him, Jamie is horrified as he discovers his father is dead, with his entire back hollowed out and replaced with a wooden shaft used in ventriloquist dummies. Jamie realizes his father had been wearing the same suit, and Ella had been at his side the entire time with her hand behind his back. As Mary Shaw's "perfect doll", Ella appears to Jamie, asking "Now who's the dummy?" Jamie screams and Mary Shaw materializes through Ella. Jamie becomes a doll, shown in Mary Shaw's photo album.

In an alternate ending, Ella had been abused by Jamie's father until she suffered a miscarriage; she sought revenge, digging up one of Mary Shaw's puppets and was instantly possessed by Mary Shaw's ghost (with Ella being killed in the process). Possessed by Shaw's spirit, Ella becomes the perfect puppet that Shaw strove to make. After killing Jaime's father, she hollowed out his corpse and used Jamie's father's corpse as a puppet to lure him back to Ravens Fair. Ella sits a tied up Jamie alongside his father and Lisa in a macabre family portrait. Jamie screams as Mary Shaw attacks him, presumably taking his tongue. The film ends with Ella reciting the poem to Jamie's corpse, tucked into bed like a child. Before blowing out the candle, Ella tells Jamie that if he sees Mary Shaw, the only thing that will protect him is silence.