"To keep it in your mind and not forget, that it is not he, or she, or them, or it that you belong to." "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
So, begins one of the strangest thrillers you'll see this year-not that Silence & Darkness doesn't echo Dylan's criticism of the failed social environment of the '70's but rather that it shows how isolating from that imperfect world has consequences. Writer/director Barak Barkan has crafted an indie that scares the bejesus out of you because there are few scares, just the disappointment that a remote idyllic life may be fraught, and nobody may know it.
Deaf Anna (Mina Walker) and blind Beth (Joan Glackin) are two sisters living in a small rural town, presumably Vermont (that's where it was filmed), with attentive local GP father (Jordan Lage),
in a modern lodge-like home overlooking much green grass and many trees. Idyllic, yes; safe, no.
The danger is the slow-burn, low-key horror as, after a neighbor's visit about her dog digging up bones, the girls begin to look more closely at the unusual attention father gives them. But, hey, he's an overly-caring doctor dad with two disabled daughters! How bad can that be?
Not that we'd ever know in the first hour of this spare 80 minutes. It's perhaps that things go so well with the sisters devoted to each other and dad doting that makes us suspect evil lurking underneath-it is after all a thriller-horror film. The contrast between the rural, familial sublimity and the lingering-reveal of dad's motives constitutes the growing fear that maybe things are too simple and good.
Because I lived for years in rural Vermont with six angelic children, I know the feeling that something could go terribly wrong if only an ignorance of the dangerous world just outside the trees and grass. I pulled us all out of there because I could not abide the cost of that simplicity, not the least of which was a naivete born of isolation and the chance for evil angels to thrive without competition from the better ones.
Silence & Darkness reminds me that the purest situations can be a sentence to danger, given the remoteness and rudeness that breeds disability, not just the physical kind. Here's a thriller whose thrills will hit home for those used to remoteness-COVID has taught us to beware of being alone.
