A film about a snow-covered area of Mexico inhabited by emotionally reticent German-speakers promises some surprises; and we get our first when the film begins with ten whole minutes without a single word of dialogue or any discernible action, before the first line (a simple "Amen") is uttered. With the opening sequences out the way, thing start to happens, but at a slow pace, and with many long scenes filmed with static cameras that reminded me of Terrence Davies' Liverpool trilogy, although those films were nowhere near as still as this one. At its worst, the result could be dismissed as a long film about agriculture; but at is best, the slow pace pays dividends, as the audience learns how to react to the minutiae of the characters' lives. For example, there's one scene, where we wait for a truck to reverse, that takes about 10 seconds, but in taking these ten seconds (which would have been cut in almost any other film), the poignancy of the moment is captured in a way would have been lost if the blank space had been edited out. But I didn't completely understand the ambiguous ending and during the final (again silent) five minutes, I regrew my impatience with the film. There's some brilliance on display here, but also some self-indulgence, albeit in highly understated form. But it's worth watching in either case, as an unsentimental but emotionally moving portrait of a community not many people elsewhere in the world know too much about.
Review of Silent Light
