Chris At The Pictures

★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

In a revelation as inevitable as the “dead on arrival” gags accompanying its reviews, this sequel to Joel Schumacher’s 1990 thriller is as pointless as it is sterile. Five medical students become obsessed with triggering their own near-deaths in attempts to capture evidence of the afterlife. After initial highs and cognitive awakenings, the group find themselves hunted by the ghosts of their individual pasts.

The post-flatline powers exhibit themselves in trust fund hunk Jamie (James Norton) as increased proficiency in medical practices, whilst in the three lead women (Ellen Page, Nina Dobrev and Kiersey Clemons) as a sudden desire to get into Jamie and Ray's (Diego Luna) pants. Though they each have their own unique traumas to shape the apparitions, increasingly tiresome jump-scares and dark corridors morph them all into interchangeable quivering wrecks by the end. Courtney (Page) at least has some of her character fleshed out (the opening sequence clues us into the revelation she withholds from her peers, so they’ll indulge her experiment), but it’s all for nothing come the final act.

Luna plays the token sceptic, and is immediately engaging to the point that he almost pulls the whole enterprise together, though his hairstyle (perhaps in unspoken homage to the original’s fabulous array of wild wigs) is a choice almost as poor as his recent decision to work with Woody Allen.

A more befuddling decision is made by the filmmakers to include Kiefer Sutherland, reprising his role from the original as the students’ mentor. Again, it’s all for naught: never does he factor into their decision to explore flatlining, investigate them, or even deliver a knowing sermon. It’s the screenwriters showing they care enough to draw Sutherland back, but not quite enough to give him anything to do, nor to provide any other tangible connections to the first film, narratively or visually. Religious imagery and reveries make way for insipid sob stories, and the smoky streets and dark architecture are swapped out for crisp surfaces and vapid digital backdrops.

All this heavy comparison might fool you into thinking I hold the first Flatliners in high esteem. For the record; I don’t. Any interesting concepts are rapidly overridden by hammy performances and Schumacher’s total reliance on imagery over intelligence. This new iteration can barely pretend to offer the former, exhibiting drama as slack as its characters, living or dead.

★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Ambivalence from on high is keenly and coldly felt in this, the new film from Martin Scorsese. In 17th century Japan, a Portuguese priest named Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson, in the second film this week that steals him away from the Taken template) renounces his faith before the Buddhist inquisitors. Refusing to believe the report, Fathers Rodriguez (Andrew Garfield) and Garrupe (Adam Driver) leave immediately for Japan to seek Ferreira and discover the truth, hoping to preach Catholicism as they travel (now is a good time to make your own Apostatise Now joke).

A reference to Coppola’s adaptation of Heart of Darkness sounds flippant, but it’s not entirely wasteful: based on a novel by Shūsaku Endō, Silence is a film concerned primarily with a crisis of faith, with the deconstruction of one’s most closely-held values by a maddening, tortuous odyssey across unyielding pastures in search of a once revered elder. Maddening is the key adjective here, because, for all the striking imagery and heightened sense of desolation, Silence is inherently frustrating in many areas.

It's a very philosophical film in the sense that it provokes an awful lot of deep and searching questions, but never seems particularly interested in finding or offering any answers. As Rodriguez and Garrupe delve further into an increasingly hostile land, all sorts of issues are raised: the morality of imperialism, if the existence of God can ever really be divined, and whether there's any need to spread Christianity when the native population are so entrenched in their Buddhist values (what's the worship of one suffering idol to another?).

Perhaps this stems from the fact I'm not a believer, but the personal religious plights left me oddly unmoved. Certainly the images of the two Padres cowering in firelit caverns are very evocative and the landscapes are astonishingly captured, but from the first frame I felt distanced from any sense of torment or emotional agony. This problem emerges from the film's distinct lack of stylistic verve in other aspects: cinematography asides, the personal drama and even moments of horror are played as implacably as the stone replication of Christ on the cross. Garfield, Driver and Yôsuke Kubozuka (who plays Kichijiro, an eternal sinner who pleads confession to Rodriguez many times) are all exceptional, but there's nothing showy or visceral about their performances. For my money, there's not enough of Driver - who I would have loved to take the central role - but I understand that Garfield has the more marketable credentials (and face).

A traditional score is replaced with ambient birdsong or the creaking of trees, and it's this particular departure from emotional (one might even say manipulative) filmmaking that only served to distance me further. It's a supremely unsettling absence that makes every scene bleed into the next with a lessened sense of dramatic heft. Perhaps I'm too used to having symphonic signposts? The realism of only using diegetic sound is admirable for this kind of story, but, at the end of the day, Scorsese isn't making The Hurt Locker.

With engagement lessened still, my ability to identify with Rodriguez' plight dipped. The absence of God is felt from the very start, as his messengers are killed and his worshippers are tortured, strung up, and left to the mercy of nature. There's no descent for us as there is for Rodriguez, no matter how well Garfield might sell it, and boy does he make a good attempt. As I said, it's not a grandstanding turn, but one of small gestures. When Rodriguez is first confronted by cold, hunger or danger of death, he sits open-limbed, in total faith that whatever his fate, God will provide. When his belief begins to unwind, he starts to retract, to curl up, clutching his arms around his chest because he fears that his own Earthly body is all that's left to protect him.

It's a very earnest display, smattered occasionally with hard cuts to a famous painting of Jesus on the cross, a comparison (or juxtaposition, depending on your own interpretation) that elicited some laughter in the screening, shortly followed by two patrons leaving altogether. While I didn't laugh, I can understand the reaction: moments such as Garrupe diving into the sea to save persecuted believers or a beheading performed by the Japanese grand inquisitor are played with such a straight face that you search for any kind of emotional reaction.

Any catharsis achieved along the way is all to do with anguish, there’s no celebration or even release. Everything slowly grinds to a halt with what must be twenty minutes left to go (or perhaps it felt that long because very little happens, a new narrator is introduced and the once free-flowing story devolves into a sliced-and-diced mess), and I almost found myself getting bored, which is not something you ever expect from a Scorsese film. For all the self-indulgence of The Wolf of Wall Street, I was never fidgeting to keep myself awake.

But all those issues considered, I can't honestly call Silence a bad film. It's beautifully mounted and intelligently conversational, with phenomenal acting... I only hope others found more engagement with its thematic struggle. For those not of a religious persuasion, I fear it's destined to linger long in the mind, but short in the heart.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆