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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: THE SILENCING
Director: Robert Pront
Year: 2020
Reviewed: December 01, 2023
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Rice Cake-Lowest Rating |
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With all due respect The Silencing, which just dropped on Netflix and stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau might be the dumbest serial killer movie I've ever seen, not to mention, quit possibly, one of the dumbest movies to which I have born witness.
Let me explain. (WARNING- spoilers will abound.)
First of all, I love the actor Nikolaj, who was perfectly cast as Jaime Lannister, and did an incredible job in an incredible movie called Shot Caller. He's the reason I even started watching The Silencing. But even he could not elevate this from the horribly plotted and thought-out script that it turned out to be. As someone once said... somewhere, "to call this movie stupid is an insult to stupid people."
So... we have a killer who decides to surgically remove the vocal chords of young girls, thereby "silencing" them, releasing them into the woods where he can hunt them with an antiquated spear-throwing weapon called an atlatl. First, we are never given a reason as to why he chose such an ancient weapon. He's a "white-guy" so there's no reasonable reason he would choose something so incongruous in the first place. Why he's hunting girls in the woods is never revealed either. He takes them to his home to do the surgery then hauls them into the woods to go through this ritualistic hunting... thing; which, of course, is never further explained. And his motivation for mutilating, abusing, hunting, torturing, and finally murdering young girls is that a drunk-driver killed his little girl. That's his motivation! I repeat... THAT'S HIS MOTIVATION! He doesn't go after drunk-drivers, no... because that would make some sort of sense. Instead, he hunts down girls... because that was NOT what happened to HIS daughter. What... what... WHAT?!!! The killer's motivation is bogus and inexplicable and moronic.
Then we have the actions of the female cop who shoots the "protagonist" thinking she's saving her "troubled" brother, when the killer, masked and covered in a ghillie suit, mimics her brothers incessant tick by cracking his knuckles. Let's see if we can unpack this in a timely manner. First of all the cop shoots the protagonist, after which there is barely any hard-feelings. She is not prosecuted. She is not given a "leave of absence". I don't think she even apologized. Then there's the "troubled" brother "tick". How did the killer no to mimic the tick; thereby making her think it was her "troubled" brother? I don't know. Nor do we find out why she was so willing to save her "troubled" brother, who at the time we all thought was the killer (remember the cracking knuckles), by attempting to murder... yes, MURDER the protagonist. Again without any ramifications befalling her in the least.
Then there's a bunch more stupid shit, like the cops coming up to an arrow head in the tree and immediately go straight to someone must be hunting girls. The protagonist doing a John Rambo First Blood suture on himself for no apparent reason whatsoever. Then he doesn't tell anyone that this bat-shit-crazy cop shot him. He doesn't own a cell phone, his dog barks at strangers on the video screen, and the cop's "troubled" brother just turns out to be one big steaming turd of a McGuffin.
This story is so poorly written and perceived that I can't imagine how it could have been any worse than it was. How do these things get made? Why... oh why does it have a 6.2 rating on imdb and a 90% "audience score" on rotten tomatoes.
The Silencing is very, very bad. Do not waste your time with it, instead watch a far superior movie like Wind River. I give The Silencing my lowest review: a RICE CAKE review.
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