The Silence

Filmmaker Baran bo Odar's thriller The Silence opens on a horrible note in 1986 as one young man rapes and inadvertently murders an 11-year-old girl in a field as another man looks on. This second, more guilt-ridden figure, vanishes from the life of the killer and reinvents himself as family man Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring). But then 23 years to the day of the original killing, another girl is murdered in the same spot, drawing into a widening web of horror and mystery not only Timo and his erstwhile accomplice, Peer (Ulrich Thomsen), but also the first girl's haunted mother, the second girl's shocked parents, several cops (including one who is still obsessed with the first case, and another who is mentally unstable following the recent death of his wife), and a host of other individuals with a connection to the events. Odar brings an elegant structure to the complex narrative and wisely does not tie up every loose end, while presenting powerful scenes that are uncomfortable, particularly one in which the grieving mother of the first girl instinctively knows that the man to whom she is serving tea in her home happens to be her daughter's killer. Most haunting of all here is the way that so much misery takes place under such gloriously sunny skies. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include interviews with costars Wotan Wilke Möhring, Sebastian Blomberg, Burghart Klaussner, and Katrin Sass (11 min.), director Baran bo Odar's 2005 short Quietsch (8 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a powerful film.] (T. Keogh)