Take a look back at these Hollywood icons in their early days to see how far they've come in their careers—and how little they've visibly aged.
Related lists from IMDb users
Title: The Silence (2010)
Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.
| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Ulrich Thomsen | ... | Peer Sommer | |
| Wotan Wilke Möhring | ... | Timo Friedrich | |
| Katrin Saß | ... | Elena Lange (as Katrin Sass) | |
| Sebastian Blomberg | ... | David Jahn | |
| Burghart Klaußner | ... | Krischan Mittich | |
| Karoline Eichhorn | ... | Ruth Weghamm | |
| Roeland Wiesnekker | ... | Karl Weghamm | |
 |
Jule Böwe | ... | Jana Gläser |
| Oliver Stokowski | ... | Matthias Grimmer | |
| Claudia Michelsen | ... | Julia Friedrich | |
|
|
Amon Robert Wendel | ... | Malte |
|
|
Kara McSorley | ... | Laura |
|
|
Lena Klenke | ... | Sinikka (as Anna-Lena Klenke) |
|
|
Helene Luise Doppler | ... | Pia (as Helene Doppler) |
|
|
Eric Bouwer | ... | Azubi Polizei |
13-year-old Sinikka vanishes on a hot summer night. Her bicycle is found in the exact place where a girl was killed 23 years ago. The dramatic present forces those involved in the original case to face their past.
Baran bo Odar's film begins almost wordlessly on a sunny day in 1986. Two men driving along in a red car (Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Möhring) encounter a young girl riding a bicycle (Helene Doppler). They pursue her into a cornfield where one of the men rapes her, kills her with a blow to the head and dumps her corpse in an adjacent lake.
Fast forward to 2009, and one of the two men (Möhring) has become a successful architect, married with two children, while the other (Thomsen) works full-time as a caretaker. The memory of that traumatic occasion haunts both of them, creating a complicated web of lies, deceit and implication that leads to the murder of another young girl (Anna-Lena Klenke).
The film's title not only refers to the silence practiced by the perpetrators of the original crime in 1986, but also describes other people's state of mind. For twenty-three years the murdered girl's mother (Katrin Sass) has kept silent about her harrowing ordeal; likewise the police inspector (Burghart Klaussner) who was involved in the original investigation but failed to achieve a result. It is only after this lengthy time-lapse that they decide to come out and voice their feelings, as well as trying to reconcile themselves to what happened in the past.
Shot in garishly bright colors (by Nikolaus Summerer) creating a world of apparently endless summer weather that nonetheless appears highly dystopian, THE SILENCE offers an insight into the pedophile mind, which often thinks it is doing nothing wrong, even while taking a perverted pleasure in watching child porn videos. The film also takes a look at the ways in which such people are allowed to flourish in societies that prefer to turn their collective backs on such unpleasant issues in the belief that everyone is fundamentally well-intentioned. bo Odar's film proves precisely the opposite; it is often the outwardly most respectable people that prove the most dangerous.