The Silencing is a thriller directed by Robin Pront from a screenplay written by Micah Ranum. The cast includes Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau, Annabelle Wallis, and Hero Feinnes-Tiffin.
The film starts off with the corpse of a young woman drifting down a river which flows through an impressive forest background. Coster-Waldeau plays a drunken former hunter who now runs a sanctuary for wildlife in honor of his young daughter, who had gone missing five years earlier. Wallis plays a young, pretty sheriff who starts an investigation into the murder of the young woman who was fished out of the river. Anyway, it doesn’t take long to figure out that some lunatic is out in the woods hunting young women. One is rescued by the drunken protagonist. The sheriff has a troubled brother who she feels overly protective toward. Everyone is a bit of a mess. One or two people discover a bit of nobility within themselves.
So when this movie started, it seemed to hold some promise. I started to be intrigued. When the aspect of someone hunting people for sport became apparent, my interest started to wane somewhat. The performances were not bad, and some of the action scenes sort of jolted my attention back, but I ended up dissatisfied with the final revelations. It’s one of those movies I should have enjoyed more, and it’s a little hard to articulate why it fell short. I think the basic premise was not terrible, but the motivation behind some of the characters’ decisions just seemed absurd. People are absurd anyway, but this movie goes in directions that really stretch the credulity. Anyway, it’s fine if one really needs to see something new during this whole pandemic business, but it’s not worth any real effort beyond that.
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