Film Name: 默杀 / A Place Called Silence
While it’s not exactly a great film, there are many things in it that work well enough to make it appealing to a wider audience.
As one of the two generals brought out by Chen Sicheng (the other one is Dai Mo), director Cole Boonley’s previous most successful work is Sheep Without a Shepherd, and this time A Place Called Silence, still continues the previous ‘success experience’, namely A Place Called Silence is a crime, suspense and reality-critical drama film.
Only this time the script of A Place Called Silence is far less solid.
Compared to Sheep Without a Shepherd, one can clearly feel that the structure and pacing of this film is much looser, with large sections of the plot and character threads being fragmented, seemingly strung together with a few key clues, but in fact with poor interconnections and chemistry.
For example, take the core bursts, Xiaotong, as a child who was able to assassinate her demonic stepfather at the age of 9, witnessed her mother’s hiding of her body and kept it a secret, as well as remembered a few of her classmates who bullied her best friend to death, and with that kind of experience and persona, there’s no way that she could have simply suffered from the bullying again at the beginning of the film, and even doing the act seems fake and all but unnecessary.
As for the secrets of Lee Han and Lim Jae Bok and the other main characters, I thought at first, ‘It can’t be that easy to guess, can it?’ It turned out to be that simple – the logic certainly works, but it’s hardly brilliant.
Storytelling and suspenseful design are no longer the hallmarks of A Place Called Silence, or rather, the film doesn’t even try to be from the start, and all it goes for is a heap of evil and constant reversals.
Aside from the poor narrative, the characterisation in A Place Called Silence is generally extreme; it’s okay to have a full cast of villains + tough guys, which I like, but it’s a bit too flat and symbolic.
The four girls who bully Huijun and Xiaotong are there purely to offend and irritate the audience, and we only get to see their bad faces when they do their evil deeds and their emptiness when they get their comeuppance, but there is no viewpoints or extensions of the bullying behaviour before and after.
I can detect that the film still wants to make some realistic criticisms, such as the gap between the rich and the poor, class oppression and so on, but all these things are just rushed through, and it still prefers to be more intuitive, exciting, and provocative to the audience’s sensory stimulation.
Despite being a bit cheap and cheap, it must be admitted that the effect is not bad, and even a little bit of texture has been added to the whole thing. ……
I really think that A Place Called Silence has a very large scale, with all the elements of bullying, murder, clandestine filming, rape, etc., and almost all of them have reached the limit of the domestic public release level, from the criminal acts to the gory images (by the way, I prefer that the censorship is much more lenient nowadays).
This kind of unabashed and unapologetic display of sinful details does bring about many side effects, such as the loss of narrative focus due to the proliferation of large-scale scenes, and the repeated occurrence of physically challenging sequences, which will make some viewers feel uncomfortable.
But because of this, the few good things in the film are accidentally made more valuable, including Huijun’s bond with Lin Zaifu, Xiaotong’s endurance of humiliation, etc. The religious symbols such as the cross sticker, the wreath of thorns, the dove, and the rebirth of falling into the water, etc., also play a certain role.
Moreover, the film’s chunky ‘memory nodes’ are perfect for stirring up the viewer’s emotions (and also for short, quick, and short videos), as Lin Zai Fu has to kill his enemy and return blood for blood, Li Han is bound to bury her husband, and Xiaotong is bound to have the last laugh … …While not typical enough, A Place Called Silence is a cool film that can be emotionally gut-wrenching for a few moments.
So, I think A Place Called Silence is just a plate of rice with strong ingredients and heavy flavours, definitely not delicious, but it can be eaten well if you just like that one bite.
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