The Silence

Suspense fans tired of low-brow, explicit exploitation movies may want to check out "The Silence," an absorbing German thriller that delivers the suspense without sacrificing the drama. At a confident and steady pace, the script allows the characters to develop powerful, yet subtle performances.

On July 8th, 1986, a eleven year old girl Pia (Helene Doppler) is raped and murdered by Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) while a second man, Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring), watches with equal parts of disgust and arousal. The two dispose of the body and return home, but while Peer began to destroy any potential evidence, Timo has already packed and boarded a bus out of town. 23 years later, to the very day, another young girl goes missing with only her bike and bag left behind at the very spot where Pia was abducted years ago. Writer/director Baran bo Odar's film, "The Silence," follows the distraught families, the police, and the two men behind the original unsolved case in a story that explores grief and guilt, obsession and duty.

It's a well-acted, emotion-charged drama whose murder mystery is almost secondary to the human element. It's a complex examination of the many facets of humanity in which even those who commit the most heinous acts aren't complete monsters. The film is about tragedy and the everlasting impact on those involved, from the victims to the perpetrators.

Director Baran bo Odar maintains a sense of morbid fascination in a film that in someone else's hands might become overwhelmingly unpleasant. Despite its nearly two-hour running time, it never becomes dull or depressing, thanks in part to large cast of characters whose nuanced portrayals strike a chord of truth -- terrifyingly so for any parent. Even though the conclusion isn't exactly overpowering, the journey is remarkably nuanced and compelling – and most certainly an uncomfortable one.

Baran bo Odar's film begins almost wordlessly on a sunny day in 1986. Two men driving along in a red car (Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Möhring) encounter a young girl riding a bicycle (Helene Doppler). They pursue her into a cornfield where one of the men rapes her, kills her with a blow to the head and dumps her corpse in an adjacent lake.

Fast forward to 2009, and one of the two men (Möhring) has become a successful architect, married with two children, while the other (Thomsen) works full-time as a caretaker. The memory of that traumatic occasion haunts both of them, creating a complicated web of lies, deceit and implication that leads to the murder of another young girl (Anna-Lena Klenke).

The film's title not only refers to the silence practiced by the perpetrators of the original crime in 1986, but also describes other people's state of mind. For twenty-three years the murdered girl's mother (Katrin Sass) has kept silent about her harrowing ordeal; likewise the police inspector (Burghart Klaussner) who was involved in the original investigation but failed to achieve a result. It is only after this lengthy time-lapse that they decide to come out and voice their feelings, as well as trying to reconcile themselves to what happened in the past.

Shot in garishly bright colors (by Nikolaus Summerer) creating a world of apparently endless summer weather that nonetheless appears highly dystopian, THE SILENCE offers an insight into the pedophile mind, which often thinks it is doing nothing wrong, even while taking a perverted pleasure in watching child porn videos. The film also takes a look at the ways in which such people are allowed to flourish in societies that prefer to turn their collective backs on such unpleasant issues in the belief that everyone is fundamentally well-intentioned. bo Odar's film proves precisely the opposite; it is often the outwardly most respectable people that prove the most dangerous.

I saw this for the first time recently n got pleasantly surprised.

Fans of Marshland, True Detective S1 n S3, The Treatment, Memories of Murder, etc will definitely enjoy this.

In 1986 an 11-year-old schoolgirl, is raped and murdered by Peer Sommer while his friend Timo watches silently from the passenger seat of his car.

Timo leaves after Pia's murder, to Sommer's dismay.

In 2009, exactly 23 years later, a 13-year-old girl goes missing and her bicycle is discovered in the same spot where the first crime happened.

Senior detective Mittich, who investigated the original murder takes an interest in the new case, but he is blocked from participating by the new senior detective.

At times the movie is very poignant considering so many characters are shattered n everyone gave good performances.

But Wotan Wilke Möhring who played Timo gave an outstanding performance.

I wud have easily rated it a 9 but for two reasons i didn't.

The 1982 murder was never solved for us audiences.

And why did the cops didnt try to locate the phone's location of Sinikka? She was carrying a phone n when her dad tried calling her, the killer threw the phone.

I had two films to review which actually are quite similar.

One is this Das letzte Schweigen, The Silence, and the other one which is from Belgium is called The Treatment.

Both films are excellent thrillers European style, which is slower, more surgical the their Hollywood counterparts if you wish, being The Treatment a little bit more dynamic in terms of pace but not that much really.

These movies are sometimes hard or even painful to watch because they deal with a very disturbing matter which is the children sexual abuse by adults mostly men, pedophiles, sexual predators filling the worst space possible in terms of sexually oriented mental illness, and I say this because despite our feelings for these monsters, (they are people truly sick, they can not help themselves, to the point that many of them want to be castrated or even executed because of the remorse and the guilt) are truly hard, particularly people like me with kids of our own.

This film is made almost documentary like, it brings to mind John Mc Naughton's Henry, portrait of a serial killer with the great performance by MIchael Rooker, being that character a guy in a murderous rampage not only with kids but everyone who get close.

Great acting of the whole cast, with Ulrich Thomsen who is mostly known for the american TV show Banshee, which is full of violence, sex, crime and there Thomsen shines as the former Amish crime boss as one of the two deranged sexual abusers here.

I'm not going to say anything to spoil this movie. Just that it's very well made, disturbing trough and through and from start to finish this is not your typical pop corn thriller but a study of extremely sick people, dark, depressing and showing you that monsters are out there for real and many of them are there to stay.

I'm not getting into technical aspects because in that field the film is correctly made but in my opinion the story and how this is told is the important thing.

Really a serious take no prisoners thriller if you are not afraid of real life nightmares.

THE SILENCE is a German murder mystery that's heavily indebted to two separate sources: firstly, the whole look and mood of the currently-popular Scandinavian cop shows (such as THE KILLING), from which the style of music is frequently ripped off (like that whole thing with a single, deep note held for a while). Meanwhile, the plot and police investigation bear more than a hint of the exceptional South Korean drama, MEMORIES OF MURDER.

What follows is predictable but occasionally highly gripping, and strangely enough different sub-plots in the movie have different levels of interest. I admit that I found the whole police investigation to be pretty dull; there isn't actually much investigating taking place, and it all seems very slow and stately. The scenes of grieving parents are so familiar by now that they didn't affect me at all.

A second, alternate part of the film follows the friendship between two men, one of whom is a paedophile and murderer. This part of the film is exceptionally, dealing with dodgy subject matter in an intensely gripping way. Ulrich Thomsen (from THE THING remake) and Wotan Wilke Mohring are both very good here, and I would have much preferred the whole film to concentrate on these two by doing away with the predictable police stuff altogether. However, what we're left with is a real film of two halves; one's powerful stuff indeed, and the other's best forgotten.