Silent Night movie review & film summary (2023) – Roger Ebert

John Woo’s new movie is a revenge thriller with such a predictable plot that one can think about the primary multicellular organisms distributing an electrochemical model of it to one another by way of osmosis. It is also one in all Woo’s finest, and one of the vital deliriously cinematic motion pictures of the yr. If ever there have been a film that demonstrated the concept that the telling issues greater than the story, it is this one.

The film is known as “Silent Evening,” and it is set at Christmas, which is when the primary couple (Joel Kinnaman and Catalina Sandino Moreno) lose their solely son to a stray bullet after a few automobiles filled with rival gang members drive by way of their neighborhood whereas capturing at one another. However the film’s title is unrelated to the same-named vacation carol. It is referred to as “Silent Evening” as a result of it is a silent film with sound. 

No one speaks a full phrase of written dialogue. Characters grunt once they crash towards a wall, get punched within the intestine, or are struck by a automobile. They gasp or scream once they’re shot or tortured. You hear sound results and soundscape noises all through, comparable to wind, rain, footsteps, and site visitors. There are pop songs with lyrics on the soundtrack, interspersed with lengthy stretches of Marco Beltrami’s deeply felt, unabashedly melodramatic rating. However no one talks, as an everyday particular person would. They alternate appears. Or, in the event that they’re alone and considering one thing tragic or troubling, they will stare into area or down at their fingers, misplaced in thought. 

Not that they do that kind of factor consistently, thoughts you. A lot of the time, they’re making an attempt to kill one another, utilizing weapons, fists, ft, knives, explosives, automobiles, bikes, and on a regular basis family objects. Or they’re conducting surveillance, drawing up plans, hardening their our bodies, working towards deadly abilities, and so forth, as a result of that is the type of film that is: the type the place individuals let their actions do the speaking.

I think individuals who do not just like the film will say it’s unrealistic or that its existence requires such steady upkeep on the filmmakers’ half that the result’s extra distracting or alienating than engrossing. I don’t have anything to say to such individuals aside from, “This film just isn’t for you.” The movie’s  dedication to its idea is the origin level for every thing distinctive about it. The results of its thoroughness is an train in pure filmmaking. Image plus sound plus music plus efficiency. The stuff that cinema is meant to be product of.

To that finish, “Silent Evening” pays tribute to one in all Woo’s best influences, operatic western director extraordinaire Sergio Leone, whereas pushing the grasp’s aesthetic additional than Leone ever did. The movie is kind of an inverted opera. Or a ballet with violence and intimations of violence instead of dance. The performers do not converse, a lot much less sing. However their faces and our bodies do. The purity of emotion they impart is disarming, distinctive, and—should you give up to the train—unexpectedly transferring. 

What’s the story? As I stated, there is not a lot to explain when it comes to occasions, and there aren’t any subversions, critiques, or out-of-nowhere twists awaiting you additional down the highway. Anyone kills a child. The child’s dad and mom’ marriage breaks aside as a result of the mother, Saya, desires to course of her grief and transfer on, whereas the dad, Brian, turns into obsessive about remodeling himself right into a one-man military and avenging his son’s loss of life precisely one yr later. He trains and trains and trains some extra. He teaches himself tips on how to knife-fight by watching a video, hardens his physique with calisthenics and weights, and learns to shoot like Soiled Harry and drive like Jason Statham.

He additionally conducts surveillance on the gang chief liable for the tragedy, Playa (Harold Torres), who has bought himself as a folks hero to some within the neighborhood, very like the gangsters performed by James Cagney in crime thrillers from the Thirties and ’40s. Brian delivers the file to the police division, the place just one detective, Scott Mescudi’s Detective Vassel, cares even a bit bit. Does Brian need assist? Not likely. Largely, he appears to need to show that the man he is about to homicide deserves to die.

The remainder is within the particulars. The presentation. The motion.

Screenwriter Robert Archer Lynn deserves credit score for presenting this materials in a approach that drew Woo’s consideration and captured it to the purpose the place Woo bought “Silent Evening” funded and turned it into his first English-language movie in twenty years. However I’d are likely to suppose the author would agree that there is nothing contemporary right here when it comes to narrative, besides maybe for the way in which the script roots the primary couple, their fellow residents, the police, and the native prison gangs within the mundane particulars of abnormal life, even because it conjures a kind of Neo-film-noir or grownup comedian e-book universe round them—the type the place a nasty man and his gang reside in a Batman villain-looking manufacturing facility tower with a large neon signal, packaging their medication and counting their cash and injecting heroin into younger ladies’s arms, and the place the gang and their rivals can shoot at one another with computerized weapons whereas drag-racing.

From the very Nineteen Eighties racial coding (the unhealthy guys are tattooed Latins, the detective a straight-arrow Black man, and the vigilante an aggrieved white dude) to the ludicrous maximus car-chases-with-shootouts, “Silent Evening” generally seems like a turbocharged cousin of a decadent “Dying Want” sequel like “The Crackdown.” Different touches channel R-rated comedian e-book flicks like “Sin Metropolis” and superhero-adjacent crime thrillers just like the John Wick motion pictures and “No one” (each of which might not exist with out Woo). The actors all appear decided to play the very best model of the hokey half they have been handed, whether or not it is Moreno etching the standard-issue fed-up spouse till it turns into a portrait in grief or Torres carrying on as if he is been forged as Nino Brown in a contemporary dance adaptation of “New Jack Metropolis,” glowering his approach by way of complete set-pieces. 

Woo has all the time had a knack for choreographed bloodletting and destruction, however whereas it will be incorrect to assert he is going for subtlety right here, there’s one thing extra centered and intimate about how he phases all of it. It is John Woo unplugged. Particular person pictures are beautiful not as a result of they appear enormous and costly and complex however due to how they’re arrange and executed and the period of time they’re put onscreen (all the time simply the correct amount, one way or the other!) in addition to for the cinematic equal of what a painter would time period “the brushwork.” The latter is especially putting within the many God’s-eye-view photographs that observe automobiles and folks by way of town and present violence as a work-in-progress (just like the shot of the black tar arcs left on the sidewalk of a truck depot the place Brian works on his precision driving); or as an occasion that abruptly concluded and left a mark on the universe (comparable to an overhead tableau of Brian and one in all his just-vanquished adversaries in a wrecked kitchen). 

The forged seems to have trusted Woo and jacked into his wavelength. Moreno and Kinnaman appear to be pulling issues out of their guts that they did not understand have been in there. A number of the pictures of characters grieving are tough to observe as a result of the performers are emotionally bare, not defending themselves. When grief offers approach to worry or rage, the impact is volcanic. Mix the actors’ efforts with Beltrami’s rating, which runs by way of most likely eighty % of the operating time, and Woo’s conductor’s-baton pacing, and also you’re a river of feeling that by no means stops flowing.