Review of The Silence

Beware! This review is crammed full of spoilers. I have no problem with the acting, the music or the photography. My problem lies with the script. In short, I did not fully, or even mostly, understand what was going on. The main thing I did not understand was which of the two miscreants committed the second murder. According to the subtitles the second murder did not involve any paedophile element, unlike the first murder, and therefore we are presumably being led to believe that it was committed by the accomplice and not the main murderer. The subtitles also told us that the presumption of the police was that whoever committed the second murder did so in order to attract the attention of the other member of the duo, though why he felt such a desire to meet him again after so long was not clear. The idea that either of them would imperil themselves by committing a murder merely for the purpose of sending a signal to the other member of the duo is little short of fatuous. Even a paedophile, let alone someone who has not committed any crime except to sit and watch a murder and do nothing about it, does not go out to murder a girl without a sexual assault merely to send out a signal. So what is going on here? Also there were too many different strands going on here, most of them adding nothing to the plot would apparently being there to add some sort of colour to the narrative. You have the former detective who beds the grieving widow. You have the shambling youngish detective, half bonkers with grief for his deceased wife You have the weird behaviour of the accomplice who goes to chat to the original widow (having years before witnessed her daughter's murder); and then, in a manner again I did not properly understand, she suspects that he was party to the death of her child and so informs the police (I think I've got that right). Worst of all, somewhere in the middle of the film they introduce a third girl victim, who seems some years before to have been kidnapped by the main murderer, tortured on a video, and then presumably killed. That aspect of the plot completely baffled me. Why was it there in the first place? I also found the fact that the original murderous paedophile got away with it a thoroughly unattractive ending to the film. So you can see that I actively disliked the film.