The Silence

Field of nightmares
Generally speaking, a field of wheat is a field of wheat; nothing more, nothing less. However, in the realm of crime thrillers, such benign rural locales can harbor ominous underpinnings ("Memories of Murder", "The Onion Field" and "In Cold Blood" come to mind). And so it is in "The Silence", a low-key, quietly unsettling genre entry from Germany. In the hands of Swiss-born writer-director Baran bo Odar (who adapted from Jan Costin Wagner's novel), a wheat field emerges as the principal character; an unlikely venue for acts running the gamut from the sacred to profane, as unfathomably mysterious and complex as the humans who commit them within its enveloping, wind-swept folds.

A flashback to the mid-1980s, involving the disappearance of a 13-year old girl, whose abandoned bicycle is found amidst the aforementioned waves of grain, sets the stage for the bulk of the story, which begins 23 years later with an eerily similar incident at the same location involving a girl of the...

Riveting!
A young girl is raped and murdered in July 1986, and then twenty-three years later an eerily similar crime occurs. The police are trying figure out if the two are connected. This German film is outstanding, bringing together the elements of crime investigation, murder mystery and grieving parents to make a film that is filled with tension. This movie contains no dull moments, and the viewer knows the culprits, but seeing the local authorities go through the investigative process is riveting. For anyone who appreciates high-quality foreign films, this is a good one.

is there something worse than pedophilia? the answer surprisingly is YES
there are two murders of young girls which take take more than two decades apart. we see the first one committed. the murderer had said to his horrified friend that he had figured out what he was from seeing him watch children. he starts pandering to his interests in friendship and then one day rapes and murders an eleven year old while his friend is along. the pedophile friend takes off and disappears and the murderer returns to being alone. over twenty years pass and then another young girl is killed in the same field and the same way.

this murder mystery is so much more than another murder case or pedophilia tale. it is a long meditation on being alone and alienated. youcan be so twisted from this aloneness that you even sporadically take up perversions, like pedophilia, just to stop being alone, you decide that having a pedophile as your friend is better than having no friend,

we are all conditioned to believe that themguy watching child pornography on his...

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