The Silence

This isn't a fast-paced suspense, more of a slow-burn. I like crime movies, so this was a good watch for me. Subtitles don't bother me at all.

a dVD MOVIE: Well written/acted and unusual subject

A beautifully rendered, though dark and depressing film. Good for discussing afterwards, but certainly not something for a "fun evening"!

We open onto a nondescript German apartment block - it's not Bauhaus, but it is a near thing. The shot tightens, drawing us into the repressing geometry and then closer still, into a plain door with a tiny peephole. We cut to a spinning, caged fan, and then a slowly rotating projector wheel. Inside a dark room, two men are viewing movies of an unsavoury kind. In a startling aerial shot, the mundane is rendered extraordinary: a square early '80s model Audi reverses out of a tight row of parallel garages. Again, constrained by the geometry of the everyday: the car, the pavings, the garages. All of this is casually symbolic of the immutable boundaries of lives, our ordinary constraints and the blinkered paths on which we must run. There is even a hamster in a cage. It doesn't run on the wheel: it tries forlornly to escape, biting frantically at the wire. What is more, these establishing shots call to mind the familiar, shared dilemma: the private urge to overcome this linearity: the inevitability of all things. You might as well run, hamster: there's no better alternative. This is a film about individuals battling their private urges; trying vainly to escape the irrepressible geometry of their lives. It is a film about the stultifying human architecture which forbids it. Of course, there are good and bad ways of self-overcoming. We realise we are observing two individuals who do unspeakable things. Their bond is not close. From above we watch them go about their business, in their square car, proceeding dully along a ramrod straight blacktop, populated either side by a verdant forest. They turn off the straight path to a deserted lane by a cornfield, in pursuit of a young girl on a bicycle. The most uncomfortable scene, in a film full of them, comes in this opening sequence where we see the girl's ghastly fate. One of the men is Timo, a mathematics student. He sits mutely in the car, only a witness to the murder. Quickly, he quits the town, horrified by what he has seen and his passive complicity in it. The perpetrator, Peer Sommer, pleads with him to stay, but even here the regular mechanisms of life - in this case a departing bus - contrive to frustrate him. Timo forges a new life. The men fall out of contact. At the scene, all that remains is the girl's discarded bicycle, some Walkman headphones and her bag. We learn her decomposed body is recovered some weeks later at the same lake. We roll forward twenty three years. Timo has found a more constructive way of grappling with geometric and structural constraints that life presents: he is an architect. He has changed his name, married and has children. Then, back in the original town, history repeats itself. A young girl goes missing, her cycle and bag are recovered at the identical spot. (There is much made of this possibly being a coincidence: surely, whatever it could be, it couldn't be that). Timo's simmering guilt, and his long-suppressed urges, pull him back into Peer's world. Also drawn in are the police investigators, the disappeared girl's parents, and also their correspondents from the original case: the murdered girl's mother Elena, and the now retired detective on the original case, Krischan, who was unable to solve the murder. The remainder of the film, with the odd flashback, charts the unravelling of this case, though to characterise this as a police procedural (or a thriller) would be to understate the engaging psychological and metaphorical study that Baran Bo Odar, in an assured debut, brings to the screen. We track Elena as she jogs through the woods, on her own treadmill: a daily routine of visiting her daughter's grave. She keeps her daughter's bedroom as it was on the day of her disappearance: she too has had trouble overcoming. Her opportunity to break with the past comes in the unlikely form of Krischan, newly interested in the case following the disappearance, and in this way also striving to overcome. There is a more primal draw between the two: In a scene strikingly resemblent of Dracula, Krischan raps on Elena Lange's shutters and scratches at her window, as if he were a vampire unable to pass without an invitation. Elena lets him in. This latter exchange leads one of the few difficulties of the picture: characters occasionally act in incomprehensible ways, as if they are motivated by the requirements of Odar's metaphorical scheme, and not their natural narrative arcs. Krischan and Elena's interaction seems neither plausible nor really necessary: there is rather more relationship breakdown and inter-marital confusion than is strictly necessary to make the point. Indeed, the cast of characters between them have as many afflictions as you could ask for: aside from the paedophiles there is a grieving, borderline unhinged police investigator, his pregnant police partner (who is left to enter the wolf's lair single-handedly, Agent Starling style), disfunctional but underdeveloped parents of the missing girl, and a bureaucratic, small-minded police chief who resents both the visionary weirdo chops of his star investigator and his offhanded treatment by Krischan, his predecessor. The Silence's thriller is tightly strung and astutely paced. Odar never allows the melodrama to dominate, and we are left with a stylish, sombre and rich film, which absolutely refuses to compromise its ending for the sake of neat resolution. As the curtain falls, the picture is book-ended by the same oppressively symmetrical shot on which it opened, and it is clear that, in this story, there have been no winners or losers - the only winner is the inevitable machinery of modern life. And the viewer of this thoughtful film. Olly Buxton

Baran Odar has crafted a mystery with a distinctly mainstream, by-the-numbers feel. A German language film with a thoroughly American film aesthetic. The performances are just that--performances--'off' and standardized. The pacing is rushed rather than organic; checking off plot points while relying on a conventional, obtrusive score for the mysterious atmosphere the functional pacing cannot deliver. Nothing kills a movie quite like over-scoring, especially if the music drones on without individuality. Here it is laughably obvious and over-determinative. Rather damning for a mystery, and deeply ironic for one whose title is synonymous with the absent of noise. The whole thing is a bit cerebral and plays like your standard TV crime drama, making immersion elusive. Even Wotan Wilke Möhring, an actor with magical eyes and real screen presence, feels like he's performing and fails focus this diffuse mess of mystery.

Good slow pace thriller. Worth the puchase.

Plays but in the chapter Repeat it stops and the picture splits. It will not advance until you press slow/search. Had to stop the movie and skip ahead. I also do not see any smug or scratch on the disc.

there are two murders of young girls which take take more than two decades apart. we see the first one committed. the murderer had said to his horrified friend that he had figured out what he was from seeing him watch children. he starts pandering to his interests in friendship and then one day rapes and murders an eleven year old while his friend is along. the pedophile friend takes off and disappears and the murderer returns to being alone. over twenty years pass and then another young girl is killed in the same field and the same way. this murder mystery is so much more than another murder case or pedophilia tale. it is a long meditation on being alone and alienated. youcan be so twisted from this aloneness that you even sporadically take up perversions, like pedophilia, just to stop being alone, you decide that having a pedophile as your friend is better than having no friend, we are all conditioned to believe that themguy watching child pornography on his computer at home is the most dangerous person out there. however, many of these people only watch. it is very chilling to realize that loneliness can be a darker and more lethal condition by far. this is very well done and it has been on my mind constantly since i saw it. as an aside, apparently young european girls alone on their bikes on solitary or back roads feel a lot safer than their counterparts do in america. it is hard for me to imagine an american eleven year old girl riding her bike down deserted roads or at night in empty streets. yes, back in the 1950s it was done here but not in 1986 or 2013. if it is being done here, the parents would be deemed neglectful. not so in europe apparently. Visit my blog with link given on my profile page here or use this phonetically given URL (livingasseniors dot blogspot dot com). Friday's entry will always be weekend entertainment recs from my 5 star Amazon reviews in film, tv, books and music. These are very heavy on buried treasures and hidden gems. My blogspot is published on Monday, Wednesday & Friday.

Le réalisateur réussit à placer le spectateur dans une ambiance lourde: celle du non-dit, du poids de la culpabilité, de l'histoire de chacun... Une belle découverte.

Silence begin with the Rape & Murder of a 13 year old girl"back in 1986, on a hot day in a wheat field ,the killer was not caught or found. fast forward 23 years later the same eerily crime occurs in the same spot as the first,the thing about this movie you get to see the perpetrator at first glance,and the bumbling Detectives work that would make you pull your hair out,I don't think I've yelled at my T.V. that much for a movie before,I think the Swiss-Born writer Director Baran Bo Odar did a fantastic job of this movie,even though it's a hard subject to handle.the Subtitles was not hard to follow big props for that. it's like they're waiting for the killer to come forward and confess. they are two other movies on this disc Quietsch (7 min) Under the Sun (60 min) Audio.German 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio.with English Subtitles. Widescreen 2.35: Runtime 119 Minutes. See This Movie To Know Who Live Amongst Us..

An unsettling thriller, European film at its best. A taught story linking an old murder to repeat itself, forcing the present to confront the past.

German screenwriter and director Baran Bo Odar`s feature film debut which he wrote and co-produced, is an adaptation of a novel from 2007 by German writer Jan Costin Wagner. It premiered at the 63rd Locarno International Film Festival in 2010, was shot on location in Erfurt, Nürnberg and Erlangen in Germany and is a German production which was produced by producers Jörg Schulze, Maren Lüthje, Florian Schneider and Frank Evers. It tells the story about a rural town in Germany where an eleven-year-old girl was brutally murdered on her way home on her bicycle on a summer day in July 1986. The case was never solved and the residents went on with their lives, but twenty-three years later a young girl by the name of Sinikka Weghamm leaves her parents to meet some of her friends and does not return home. The following day, a police officer named David Jahn who recently returned to his job after having been away due to the loss of his wife, is informed that a local farmer has seen a gym bag and a rock covered in blood on the cornfield where the crime in 1986 took place. Shortly after David, his pregnant partner Jana Gläser and his superior officer Matthias Grimmer have gotten started with the investigation of the case, the whole town learns about the disappearance of Sinikka Weghamm. The disturbing news affects all the residents in the small community and especially the mother of the first victim Elena Lange, Timo Friedrich, a married architect with two children and Krischan Mittich, the former police officer on the unsolved case who thinks the two cases are related. Distinctly and precisely directed by Swiss-born filmmaker Baran Bo Odar, this finely paced and incisive fictional tale draws an invariably intriguing and unsettling portrayal of a complicated investigation of a gruesome crime and an intimate friendship between a caretaker and a former maths student. While notable for its naturalistic and colorful milieu depictions, the ardent cinematography by cinematographer Nikolaus Summerer, production design by German production designer Christian M. Goldbeck and production designer Yesim Zolan and the efficient use of sound, this character-driven and narrative-driven psychological thriller interrelates multiple stories, depicts several studies of character and examines themes such as interpersonal relations, interpersonal communication, friendship and grief. Set in a German town close to the countryside during the early 21st century, this foreboding and melodramatic tale about the correlation between good and evil and beauty and violence, contains a fine score by composers Paz De Deaux, Kris Steininger and Michael Kamm and is impelled and reinforced by its fragmented narrative structure and the engaging and involving acting performances by Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen, German actor Burghart Klaussner, German actress Katrin Sass, German actor Wotan Wilke Möhring and German actor Sebastian Blomberg. A poignantly atmospheric and suspenseful independent film which gained the Frankfurt Book Fair Award for Best International Literary Film Adaptation in 2010.

This was one of the best films I've watched over the past few years. It is quite disturbing as it deals with the taboo subject of pedophilia. It does not exploit the topic through cheap sensationalism but rather portrays the inner turmoil and personality traits of the typical pedophile. The film also does a fantastic job of developing the characters of the individuals investigating the crimes and the families dealing with the devastation of the loss of a child. I was left with a sense of unease from start to finish as the tension never subsides. I strongly recommend this film to foreign film lovers who are willing to tolerate subtitles in order to view an excellent film.