New Release Review - Of Silence

A depressed widowed man begins to hear strange noises.

Directed by: Jeremiah Sayys
Starring: Jeremiah Sayys, Masiela Lusha, Ashlee Gillespie

If you follow a man into madness, does the madness take you with it? After watching 'Of Silence', that question keeps rolling around in my head. Unfortunately, like all of the questions that arise from the film, it too goes unanswered.
The film begins with Colby (Sayys) returning home, not long after losing his wife, Annabelle (Lusha). Right off the bat, it's clear that Colby is having a hard time dealing with the loss, and even when his family comes to visit, with the exception of his sister, Hayley (Gillespie), they are unable to reach him in any meaningful or helpful way. In fact, most interactions with them are kind of awkward and only serve to depress Colby even further.
As the film continues tracking Colby’s slow decent into madness, his own silence appears to be the worst thing for him, because the longer he is quiet, the louder everything around him becomes. At first, the random eerie sounds seem to be in his head and, honestly, if it was me, I would have gone to a doctor or a specialist, because some of the noises he thinks he hears are downright creepy. As things become more intense, it seems like these sounds are not just in his head, but are actually caused by something not of this world. Sadly, in the end, absolutely nothing is explained and the film ends so abruptly that there is no time to even absorb the final images to even try to decide what you think had just happened.
Besides having nothing even resembling a payoff for all of the leg work given to the viewer by the story telling, there is actually little wrong with this film. The acting starts off a bit shaky, when the two brothers seem like they are tired rather than looking depressed, but after that Sayys is actually convincingly disturbed at times, and there was a moment or two where I thought there might actually have been something really wrong with him.
The greatest asset to this film is, by far, the camera work and sound editing, because together the filmmakers were able to create a great atmosphere for these characters to dwell. Their hard work really shows as the film becomes darker and as the intensity builds with each event.  If some of the bigger budget thrillers that have come out recently had been able to do what was done here in terms of atmosphere, I would have a greater hope for the future of horror thrillers.

Ultimately, if the film had actually been building to something explainable, or even tried to explain what was actually happening, this would have been a gem in independent horror. Sadly, for some reason, the efforts of the actors and crew are hung out to dry and will probably be missed by the masses. Hopefully, Sayys has some more horror and thriller ideas up his sleeve because if he is able to build a world as eerie as this around a complete story, where the audience doesn’t have to work as hard to understand what is happening, I am sure I will thoroughly enjoy it.

4/10

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Andy Comer