That Dripping, Queasy, Beautiful Angst
On the surface, watching a two-hour German drama about killer pedophiles at 3am is a bad idea. Don't get me wrong: I love a good murder mystery, and have no problem reading subtitles,* but nothing about Baran bo Odar's The Silence had me rushing to press "Play". Fortunately, the charged, stirring performances and challenging ideas bursting at this film's seams are far more effective than coffee--and oddly fun in a way that makes the icky bits (a little) easier to handle.
The Silence begins with the 1986 rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl named Pia (Helene Luise Doppler) at the hands of college groundskeeper Peer Sommer (Ulrich Thomsen). Peer's best friend, Timo (Wotan Wilke Mohring), an awkward young student, witnesses the crime, but is too freaked out to step in. They dispose of the evidence and part ways, with Timo fighting guilt not just for his inaction, but also for the sexual urges he'd been suppressing in the hours leading up to the attack--which he spent in Peer's apartment, watching child pornography.
Flash forward twenty-three years. Pia's death, once the subject of a media super-storm, is now but a memory marked by a wooden cross in the field near where her body was found. But the mystery still eats at Elena (Katrin Sass), her emotionally crippled mother, and Krischan (Burghart Klaußner), the newly retired, alcoholic detective dogged by his career's greatest unsolved case. On the anniversary of Pia's disappearance, another girl is found dead, compelling Krischan to unofficially team up with an equally damaged young cop named David (Sebastian Blomberg), whose wife recently died of cancer.
If you're already feeling squeamish aboard this misery train, watch out: we haven't even left the station. The story also follows the new victim's parents (played with understated dread and battered, underlying love by Karoline Eichornn and Roeland Weisnekker), and we get a taste of the middle-aged Timo's new life--which includes an ostensibly happy wife and children.
Where most films of this kind would likely focus on the investigation's sensational intricacies or showcase boisterous performances of over-written dialogue, The Silence works its way under the skin by opting for a world view based in Naturalism. Bo Odar, adapting Jan Costin Wagner's novel, fills his movie with unhinged characters whose inner tortures contrast the relentlessly tranquil natural world in which they live. For every shot of David and Timo trying to keep their shit together, there are three fly-overs of oblivious woods and wheat fields. The only two characters to make it out of the story unscathed do so by accepting their place in a cold, uncaring universe. Like it or not, the film's hero (I use that term based solely on the winner of the Naturalism game) is a class A predator in every sense of the word; more importantly, he's a survivor.
It's not every day that I'm presented with a film that suggests the so-called "good guys" are suckers. I have to say, it's refreshing--intellectually and emotionally, too, if I'm being honest. Though there's a strong David Fincher influence in bo Odar's visuals and choice of material, The Silence is more akin to Todd Field's Little Children than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. All three films tackle twisty, uncomfortable subject matter and center on deeply flawed characters. But for all its conspiracy, rape, and depravity, Dragon Tattoo ends happily. Little Children (also a movie about pedophilia) is a mostly effective drama that winds up a cartoon because its characters are either too stupid, too selfish, or too trapped in their own heads to forge better lives. But bo Odar's movie takes matters to the ultimate next level of cynicism, boldly stating that even the noblest of men is doomed to fall short of happiness as long as he aspires to control things other than his own reaction to inevitably unfair change.
I don't even agree with this thesis, necessarily, but the writer/director sells the hell out of his viewpoint. The most interesting argument comes disguised in the dynamic between Peer and Timo. The elder, the murderer, is aware that he's a monster and has seemingly made an agreement with himself to not fight what he sees as part of his DNA. Timo, on the other hand, has built such a wall of cognitive and spiritual dissonance, that we're led to believe he "cured" himself of his urges until Peer showed back up in his life. The Nature of The Silence is not the bogeyman of climate change or volatile volcanoes; it's Human Nature, a much trickier beast to wrangle--and an almost impossible one to reconcile with.
All that armchair psycho-babble is my long-winded way of saying that you should seek out The Silence at once. You bet it's tough to get through, as is all great, challenging art. It's also a gorgeous movie full of powerhouse performances and big ideas that will haunt you long after the lights come up.
Note: If you're in Chicago this week, you can check out The Silence on the big screen at The Music Box Theatre.
*Seriously, if one more idiot complains to me that subtitles distract them from what's happening on-screen, I'm going to ask about their harrowing struggles with highway billboards and TV commercials.