The overhead images from helicopters and cranes are integral to the telling of the story, but also essential to tracking its reverberations. The twin killings in "The Silence" aren't just crimes against individuals; they're crimes against the natural order. Sometimes the aerial views are simply date-stamped chapter markers, dividing the narrative into discrete blocks of time; sometimes the camera rises as if tracing a silent howl of grief across the temporal and spatial landscape; sometimes they feel like the manifestations of an objective moral intelligence — not a "God's-eye-view," exactly, but a kind of cosmic perspective tracing the marks human beings make upon the Earth, literally and figuratively.
The film begins on a sizzling day in July, 1986. The camera closes in on two brown exterior doors in an anonymous apartment complex. Behind one of them, two men sit in semi-darkness, watching a grimy 16mm amateur bondage movie. A fan buzzes in the corner and an amber sliver of afternoon sunlight is exposed under the blinds. When the film runs out, the two men silently exit the building, walk to the garage and get into a car. They act with solemn determination, having apparently reached some sort of unspoken agreement about where they're going and what they plan to do. The camera watches them — and the heedless everyday life all around them — from directly overhead. Until their vehicle comes up on a girl riding her bike beside the road, the view shifts to ground-level; in a chilling moment, she veers off the highway and down a perpendicular dirt road, riding directly away from the camera. The car passes by and, seconds later, backs into the frame and turns down the side road after her.
In the last decade or so, the northern Europeans have surpassed the Americans in the making of deeply unsettling thrillers that are gripping to watch and stay with you afterward — from the "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2010) trilogy to "The Bridge" ("Bron/Broen") on television. American thrillers tend to be polished but stay focused on the superficial; they're mainly about action, about interchangeable people and machines doing things. They leave out the juicy stuff that's harder to convey — like who the people are, how they feel, what motivates them (beyond the formulaic contrivances necessary to the plot), and the physical and psychological details of the worlds in which they live. But this is what immerses you in a movie, not the simple mechanics of plot and action.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lo565prrCnmRraGFo