The Silence begins with a murder of a young girl in a field following an attempted rape, and the second of the men present leaves town at once to distance himself from the one responsible. This is structurally puzzling: the
Columbo TV series was unusual in telling us who was guilty right at the start and then having the detective gradually get to what we knew all along, but the villains in that were ingenious and arrogant and the pleasure lay in them having the smiles gradually wiped off their faces. Here, however, the culprits are just human detritus and the crime fumbled and pathetic. It's hard to see where the director is going with this.
Then we move forward 23 years, and it happens again, but now the identity of the killer is unclear. Suddenly the film picks up. It's still a heartless, brutish affair, very much a cousin of recent and often overrated Scandinavian crime drama, but, crucially, it starts to engage the brain by remaining quite poker-faced about the eventual outcome whilst avoiding the trap of just chucking red herrings at the viewer.
7/10
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