The Silence
Making his feature debut, Swiss-born writer/director Baran bo Odar has turned Jan Costin Wagner’s 2007 novel The Silence
into a taut, beautifully acted thriller. In July 1983 Peer and Timo
(Ulrich Thomsen and Wotan Wilke Möhring) drive into the German
countryside. They see a little girl, later identified as Pia, riding her
bike, alone. Peer, the older of the two men, chases the girl into a
wheat field, and then rapes and strangles her. Timo, paralyzed with fear
or horror or both, never leaves the car. Flash forward to present day. A
girl named Sinikka is missing, having been snatched from the exact spot
where the first girl was killed, prompting the disgraced detective from
the original case (Burghart Klaussner) to come out of retirement, even
as the current detective (Sebastian Blomberg) struggles to focus through
the blur of grief he’s feeling over the death of his wife. The suspense
comes not just from the race to find Sinikka, but from the investment
one makes in the emotional disintegration we see taking place inside
every person associated with the case, from the killers to the cops to
the parents of both girls, all of whom we come to know so intimately
that one thinks of them for days afterward. (Chuck Wilson)