The Silence

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2006

The Silence
Cate Shortland
AUSTRALIA, 2006
English
104 minutes
Colour
Production Company: Jan Chapman Films
Executive Producer: Scott Meek, Miranda Dear
Producer: Jan Chapman
Screenplay: Alice Addison, Mary Walsh
Cinematographer: Robert Humphreys
Editor: Scott Gray
Production Designer: Melinda Doring
Sound: Liam Egan
Music: Antony Partos
Principal Cast: Richard Roxburgh, Essie Davis, Emily Barclay, Alice McConnell
Production: Jan Chapman Films

Cate Shortland’s extraordinary debut feature, Somersault, announced a profound new talent on the Australian scene. Her languid, sensual imagery and questing, dissatisfied young protagonists seemed to embody the frustrated hopes of her generation.

The Silence is not exactly her newest film; it is a two-part television drama commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was greeted with enormous critical approval upon its broadcast earlier this year—and it’s easy to see why. It shares the same visceral, slightly dangerous flavour and dreamy mise-en-scene of Somersault, but transposed into a kick-ass policier. This work may have premiered on television, but its visual power and total command of storytelling make it cinema through and through.

Detective Richard Treloar (the superlative Richard Roxburgh) is transferred to a desk job at the Police Museum after his involvement in a fatal, largely unexplained shooting. While preparing for an exhibition, he becomes obsessed with a haunting black-and-white image of a woman, gunned down in a silk dress, lying on a pier, her belly a blotchy mess from the bullet she took. He starts searching for her face in other images and begins to see anomalies.

Richard launches into an investigation that leads him to an ornery former cop who is now a boxing coach. He holds the key to the mystery; Richard returns to speak with him once more only to find him dead—as though murdered by the now-uncovered past. Richard finds that he himself is increasingly implicated not only in the murder, but also in the photograph itself, as the film leads to an unexpected and unsettling conclusion.

Performances are wonderful all around, with Roxburgh terrific as the tortured cop and hot new talent Emily Barclay as Evelyn, his reluctant sidekick. The film also has a most interesting point of view: this is one of the few male-centred policiers I can recall that was written (by Alice Addison and Mary Walsh) and directed by women. The perspective is fascinating and the central character much more rounded—especially in his relationship to the women in his life—than the genre usually yields.
—Noah Cowan