LivingWitness

This movie is kind of a mixed bag. I've given it a 7 because I think the current IMDb rating (6.1/10) is a little low, but I think 6.5 or 6.6 would be a fair rating.

On the plus side, I think the music and editing were quite effective. It has a pretty creepy atmosphere, and a lot of that is because of the music and editing. It's also not that reliant on jump scares to create the fear factor; when they do happen, they're mostly incidental in scenes where the fear factor has already been built up.

The last few minutes of the movie were also genuinely some of the scariest of the film, too. Actually, this had one of the creepiest endings I've ever seen in a horror movie, to the point that it makes up for all the negative points I'm going to mention in a minute.

Some of the other reviews, especially the negative ones, have suggested the two protagonists are particularly stupid horror heroes. I don't know if that's true. In real life, people do all kinds of stupid things in high stress situations, and these two were already stressed out before the movie began. Maybe they just got unlucky and met some psychos on what was already a bad night for them.

I feel like a lot of people struggle with this in general, though. Yes, of course the protagonists make certain decisions in order to make the plot go forward. That's how movies work. Sometimes someone has to make a mistake for the story to make sense.

There were a couple of points I'd say are neutral. I think the handheld cameras are a bit of a dated technique and they probably wouldn't have been used as extensively if the movie was made today. However, The Strangers wasn't particularly obnoxious about it, and there are times where it adds to the atmosphere.

I also didn't really like the double prologue at the start. You know, how it had the voice over and then a couple of shots of the little boys finding the carnage the morning after. I think it would have been fine to just have one or the other. The flipside to this is that this really is just the first couple of minutes and the movie isn't all that long.

My biggest gripe with this is that the plot was very thin at times, and I don't think there were enough scares to make up for that. There also wasn't enough underlying commentary, either about the situation as a whole or about the protagonists, to warrant such a thin plot.

It also didn't really do much to set up the villains as being particularly iconic, either. Outside of one or two lines towards the end, they never do anything that'd put them up there with Samara or Freddy Krueger. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal, but this is very obviously a movie that lives and dies by the quality of its villains, and the quality just wasn't here this time.

Overall though, there's enough here that I can see why it's obviously landed with some people. I have my issues with it, but I can see how it could have been a better movie, and I can see why other people would like it, especially if it was one of the first horror movies aimed at older teens and adults they saw.

The thing with a lot of anthology horror movies is that the segments can be a little bit scattershot, and that's always been the perennial problem for the format. I think this is much more noticeable with Nightmares than it is with a lot of the others I've seen over the years.

If this film had literally just been 'The Bishop of Battle' as a standalone short film, it probably would have been a 7/10 or a 7.5/10 thing for me. As it is, the other segments drag it down, either through being largely uninteresting takes on urban legends or even just not being scary.

Having said that, I do feel like some reviews I've seen, both here on IMDb and put out by professional critics, are mean spirited. Yeah, some of the segments aren't great, but is it really fair to say that it's because the protagonists are dumb, as one critic put it? Maybe they're just regular people who don't know they're in a horror movie.

The problem here really is that one, it's very difficult to come out with an anthology film that's consistently good, which is why the ones that are stand out so much, and two, it's especially difficult to do one like this based on urban legends. A lot of other films made in a similar kind of vein would probably end up coming off as edgy for the sake of it rather than just middle of the road like Nightmares did. I think this film should get a lot more credit for that.

Overall, I don't know if I'd recommend this to anyone if they weren't already a fan of the format. I think 'The Bishop of Battle' is worth it if you can just see that segment, even if you aren't ordinarily a fan of the horror anthology format, though.

On a technical level, Silence is about as close to perfect as you can hope for. Every shot is beautiful. The performances are tremendous; the character arcs make sense, and every line of dialogue works to move the film forward in some way. The script is also good.

The trouble is that I think you need to be Catholic to fully connect with this movie. At the very least, you need to be some flavour of Christian. If you aren't, this is going to be a very dull, but very beautiful, experience about men having doubts about a faith you've never shared.

Silence makes me wish I were Catholic because I think this would actually be an incredibly profound movie to watch if I was. I might even think this is one of the best films ever shot if I was. As it is, it's just a bit dull.

By the same token though, this is still leagues ahead of most of the Christian-oriented movies I've seen. With most of the others I've seen, they have no real artistic merit and the only reason anyone would defend them is if they have a clear ideological reason to. At least a reasonable person can see why Silence could be a great and deeply profound film to someone, even if it doesn't quite connect with them specifically.