The Silence

'The Silence' is a dour, multi-perspective thriller, telling the story of a murder investigation and its links to another killing twenty years before. The film effectively conveys a strong sense of a contemporary German environment, making the mundane seem very particular, but somehow the whole thing doesn't quite gel: there are too many points of view to make the viewer care about any one, and the mystery depends on an unlikely motive, with a deliberately inscrutable ending. For me the real problem came in the scene where two policemen fight over the hunch that one of them has: it's just not convincing that either of them would care so much. It's a rare case, in my opinion, of a movie that might have benefited from just a little Hollywood showmanship.