There’s a scary statistic at the end of the harrowing drama Silo, which is set in increasingly desolate farm territory in the U.S. Since the late 1960s, we’re told, more than 1,200 deaths have occurred as the result of farmers and farmhands trapped inside giant storage silos when thousands of tons of corn kernels or grain are dumped inside. The makers of Silo learned a lot about the subject when they made a documentary, Silo: Edge of the Real World, a while back, and they’ve leveraged their research into a gripping melodrama about people barely hanging onto, or trying to escape from, a way of life.
The action takes place on a corn farm, where Junior (Jim Parrack) lives with his father, who is stricken with dementia. Junior has one experienced old hand, Sutter (James DeForest Parker), working for him, and he pays a couple of teenage boys, Lucha (Danny Ramirez) and Cody (Jack DiFalco), to handle various chores. The latter’s mother, Valerie (Jill Paice) is a nurse working in a home for the memory impaired. The absence of Cody’s father naturally raises some questions, but the answers become woven into a long history of tragedy that plays a part in the horrors to come.
On a typical day of improvising solutions to mechanical problems on Junior’s farm, Sutter leads Cody down into a corn silo. A button outside is pushed at the wrong time. Inside, the flood of corn pouring in might as well be quick-drying cement. The rescue effort to save Cody and Sutter involves first responders from two towns, some bickering, and wariness about the reliability of a volunteer fire chief (Jeremy Holm) who lost the community’s trust. The lean, taut narrative and driven characters are powerful, as is the sense that America’s hollowing-out farming community is more endangered than we realize. Silo sticks with you like a lingering nightmare. Strongly recommended.