Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016)

Two young Jesuit priests travel to 17th-century Japan in search of their missing mentor and encounter a world where the local inquisition is determined to stamp out Christianity from their populace.
Over three hours of brutality and much hand-wringing and crying from the lead, Andrew Garfield, then ensue as the authorities try to get him to renounce the faith.
As befits a director who has always sincerely wrestled in his films with the conflict between personal truth and virtuous action, even in the ones seemingly wholly outside the spiritual field, Silence is a solemn, contemplative work that raises serious issues. But to fully engage with it, one has to turn a blind eye to the inherent colonialism of the premise, with the Japanese authorities given many of the attributes of Satan as the great tempter, and the naive priest's demented refusal to give in, even in the face of all the suffering this is causing to his followers.
The film's drawn-out length does allow some balance to be restored as Liam Neeson turns up as the lost mentor, and brings mature pragmatism in to temper his disciple's fervour. But you still suspect that this is a careful director seeing that in order to be persuasive, it's necessary to have strong counterarguments, and not that these are actually supposed to detract from the validity of Garfield's belief in a voice he wants to be in his head.

6/10