FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS: In the early scenes of his austere thriller, The Silence, Swiss-born filmmaker Baran bo Odar plays with your perceptions of time: Brief, unexplained scenes introduce the various characters, while heightened technique – a synthesised frenzy cutting to silence, passing shots becalmed in slow-motion – moves the very tempo up and down. Most thrillers are about a lack of time, but Odar has made one that’s literally timeless, as two similar crimes bridge a gap of 23 years and lives become caught in a moment they can never quite escape from. The passing of time, and the hope that it can heal and change for the better, are revealed as an illusion.
The first crime occurs in 1986, when two men with an unspoken bond drive rural roads until they spy a young girl, Pia, cycling home from school. They follow her to a dirt road in a golden wheat field, where the first man rapes her while the second watches, equally entranced and horrified. When the victim strikes out at her attacker, he brutally kills her. More than two decades later, in 2009, the unsolved case touches many, whether they know it or not. The girl’s mother, Elena (Katrin Sass), jogs every day to her daughter’s unofficial roadside memorial, while the retiring police detective, Krischan (Burghart Klausner), who couldn’t find the culprit drunkenly obsesses over his failure.
Pia’s rape and murder is not just a crime, it’s a hex that draws people in. Krischan’s obsession passes to David (Sebastian Blomberg), his younger partner, who has had a mental breakdown following his wife’s death. When another young girl, Sinikka, goes missing, with her bike found at the same spot as Pia’s, he takes up the case despite threatening to unravel at the slightest strain.
The film intercuts between the various protagonists, capturing them in minor moments that link them as spiritually interdependent. The tone, at once involved but contemplatively distant, is reminiscent not of the gritty procedural genre, but the sombre, turn of the century studies of suburban American ennui such as American Beauty or The Chumscrubber. Each character is accorded explanation without judgment, including the killer’s acquiescent sidekick, who in 2009 is the happily married father of two, Timo (Wotan Wilke Mohring). Seeing the media’s coverage of Sinikka’s disappearance, and its match to Pia’s circumstances, he’s also drawn back to the place he’s spent half his life fleeing.
The Silence uses the second disappearance (no body has been found) as a prism to examine various relationships. As the camera picks out unsettling tableaus, such as the lighting of a crime scene at night, Sinikka’s parents literally break down and fall away from each other, while an excited Krischarn, hopeful of a second chance at justice, enters into an unexpected relationship with the devastated Elena, who must relive her own memories with each development.
The careful uncovering extends equally to the horrified Timo and his one-time mentor, genial apartment block caretaker Peer (Ulrich Thomsen). Having hidden from his one-time friend, the former finds himself drawn back into the latter’s orbit. Peer, in the ultimate cruelty, more than anything misses his friend and his new crime is a way of drawing Timo back; Sinikka is nothing more than a sociopath’s way of making contact. Barely able to speak, Mohring in turn captures Timo’s distress with corrosive intensity.
This compelling study, with its irregular cops – the officially retired Krischarn, the haggard David, and his pregnant colleague, Jana (Jule Bowe) – and feel for the silent undercurrents of hemmed in lives, manages to reinvigorate the serial killer genre. That’s a major achievement for any contemporary release, but especially a German title, since the category’s peak for the last 80 years, and quite probably the next 80 too, has been Fritz Lang’s magisterial M.
