“The Silence”: A serial killer is on the loose in this twisty, David Lynch-esque thriller
You'll know who the killer is right away — kind of — in this ominous German drama
Topics: Movies, Thrillers, Crime, Europe, Germany, Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies, Entertainment News
Violent crime, especially of the random and spectacular variety that people make movies about, remains a rare event in Western Europe. But rare is not the same as nonexistent – as the Anders Breivik case makes entirely too clear – and for complicated reasons European pop culture in the Stieg Larsson era has become increasingly obsessed with gruesome murder yarns, previously an American specialty. Writer-director Baran bo Odar’s ominous and atmospheric German crime thriller “The Silence” mixes together a lot of familiar elements: a town haunted by a murder from the distant past, a damaged cop hero battling his personal demons, and the general David Lynch sense that evil lurks below the surface of an oppressively normal place.
But this adaptation of a bestselling novel by Jan Costin Wagner (which is being published next week in an American paperback edition, as “Silence”) throws in an inside-out twist that isn’t entirely original but adds some tragic and philosophical depth. In the audience, we’re constantly several steps ahead of the bickering and distracted investigators; within the film’s first few minutes, we know who committed an unsolved child-killing in 1986 that has subtly disarranged the life of this backwater suburban community. (Wagner’s novels are written in German but set in Finland; Odar has transposed the action to a fictional town in what looks to be central or southern Germany.) We see the two guys who rape and murder 11-year-old Pia in a remote field, leaving her bicycle and headphones behind, and before long we know where they are today, and how far they’ve drifted since that day. (It gives absolutely nothing away to say that one of them is played, and chillingly, by the fine Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen.)
We also understand pretty quickly that the startlingly similar disappearance of another young girl, with her bicycle abandoned on the same spot exactly 23 years later, is no coincidence. But exactly what the connection is, who committed the second murder and why – those things keep us guessing for a while, and likely reaching the wrong conclusions. Both Krischan (Burghart Klaussner), the retired detective who investigated the first crime, and his recently bereaved younger colleague David (Sebastian Blomberg) are savvy enough to reject the official story that the two events are unrelated, or that the second is a copycat killing. What we don’t know is whether these flawed heroes are capable of piecing together the fragile threads connecting the cold case to the new one.





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