The Silence
Das letzte Schweigen

This German thriller/police procedural/psychological character study, the debut film of Swiss director Baran bo Odar, is a mixed bag of style and storytelling. The film opens with the chilling rape and accidental murder of a teenager and then flashes forward twenty-three years to the disappearance of another young girl. There are ties to the original crime that set off a police investigation and dredge up memories for the mother of the original victim. She is played by Katrin Sass who delivers a nuanced performance that captures the anguished quality of a parent living with the memory of a murdered child. The rest of the cast is not as subtle and they are ham-fistedly introduced. We are denied a clear understanding of whom all the detectives are until far too late in the picture, and the plotting of the narrative is similarly awkward and unfocused. Almost every character in the overwritten script seems to be living with some kind of haunted memory that cannot be shaken.

While it is never dull, the film never fully engages. I found myself thinking of the many films and series this picture resembles, and could not help comparing it unfavorably to them. The chilling tone of dread and creepy behavior doesn’t come close to George Sluizer’s Dutch masterpiece The Vanishing; the exploration of the torment and guilt felt by the survivors of a murder victim is interesting but not on the level of Bong Joon-ho’s Korean procedural Memories of Murder; and the depiction of grief over the loss of a child is robust but without the emotional rawness and immediacy of David Lynch’s brilliant American television pilot Twin Peaks. In the end, I wished I had been watching any of these instead of The Silence.