Silent Torment
Watching Sam Quah’s mainland hit might be what it feels like to go out of your mind.
A Place Called Silence
Director: Sam Quah • Writer: Sam Quah, Wang Zhizhi, Wang Yimeng
Starring: Janine Chang, Eric Wang, Francis Ng, Wang Shengdi, Cai Ming, Xu Jiao
China • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong Aug 8 • IIB
Grade: C-
People, please welcome Doma City to the roster of vaguely Malaysian/Thai/Indonesian or otherwise anonymously Southeast Asian urban hellholes as seen through the lens of Chinese film producers. A place where absolutely everyone is an ice cold asshole, and sordid crime runs rampant. I don’t have the energy to create a link to every player on the deep bench of films from this histrionic sub-genre that have trickled onto screens in the last couple of years, for which A Place Called Silence | 默殺 sets a new bar. Whether it’s low or high depends on your POV.
Silence ostensibly pivots on a psycho killer in a mask and rain-slicker murdering girls from elite (?) Jing Hwa High School – which has a handy sign across from the main entrance stating, “Look both ways. Cherish your life” WTF? – and the world’s crappiest detective, Dai Guodong (why, Francis Ng Chun-yu? Why?), investigating. At first, he’s looking for three missing Mean Girls (who all look about 32 years old), and then a fourth after her body swings from the rafter during assembly. Hoh, hoh, these Mean Girls weren’t just mean: they were monsters, and they bullied school cleaning lady Li Han’s (Janine Chang Chunning, Love After Love, The Invisible Guest, in frantic mode) mute daughter Xiao Tong (Wang Shengdi) and her bestie Huijun (Xu Jiao) mercilessly. Don’t start me on the film’s interpretation of special needs kids. Anyway, when Xiao Tong goes missing as well, suspicion falls on Huijun’s grieving working class dad Lin Zaifu (Eric Wang Chuanjun, No More Bets). Huijun died in a tragic accident, you see, sometime after they survived the Indian Ocean tsunami (!) of 2004, and he’s a little kooky now. Li is sure he’s involved, Dai seems to agree, and they all start chasing each other and rooting through trash. Li’s powers of deduction and her Hannibal-style ability to “see” the crime is especially entertaining.
Please get me a new agent
This piece of shit had a US$50 million opening weekend in China in early July, so lord only knows how little there was to choose from to justify that haul. A Place Called Silence is a violent, morally flimsy mess defined most by its loose threads and wannabe thought-provoking narrative. Trouble is, writer-director Sam Quah Boon-lip is a pretender, cribbing from better horror (this has strong slasher vibes), noir and police procedurals and trying to pass this tripe off as “edgy”. His break-out hit (how is beyond me) Sheep Without a Shepherd was itself a remake of Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam, which was Jeethu Joseph’s Malayalam film; Silence is a remake of Quah’s own 2022 Singapore/Malaysia co-production with Wu Kang-ren. Are you sensing a pattern?
Derivative hack patterns aside – and I have no problem with derivation, just do it well – Silence is simply over-stuffed with twist upon twist upon twist that muddy the good/bad, right/wrong, justice/law waters too badly to be challenging, and most offensively make no logical sense. A woman who beats her daughter daily does so to “set boundaries” with… dirty old men? If someone can explain to me how that works, have at it. The pervy son of a cop winds up having no significance in the context of the larger story is there because…? Same question. Why Quah thought clangy “comedy” would be a welcome diversion is anyone’s guess. Oh, there’s comedy, it’s just not in the right places. Ng’s Dai is supposed to be surly but professional. He’s not. Li’s landlord Mrs Xu (Cai Ming) is supposed to be charmingly pushy. She’s not. Get this guy to a writer’s lab.
The high school murders and Lin’s fatherly grief are, naturally, the tip of an iceberg bloated by the persistent need to recap every narrative beat (in case we fell asleep) and spell out all the characters’ motivations, actions and consequences. Lurking at the heart of the story are questions about privilege, justice, corruption and collective responsibility, all of which Quah and co-writers Wang Zhizhi and Wang Yimeng suggest and then drop. And it comes with the added bonuses of shady morality – everyone’s doing bad things for the right reasons – shoddy VFX (the enormous symbolic pigeon and Xiao Tong’s giant head against a wheat field are particularly hilarious) and terrible framing; what Quah’s regular DOP Zhang Ying (Elisa’s Day) was thinking is the film’s biggest mystery. Just watch Dai’s lieutenants amble around the police precinct. It’s amazing they didn’t bump into a doorway. Of course it ends with a laughable epilogue about everyone who needed to go to jail going to jail, because ambiguity and darkness don’t work for China. It also renders all the cleansing water imagery moot. Arguing the mixed messaging, racism and straight boneheadedness of these films is exhausting, but if you’re in the mood for an extra murdery, needlessly convoluted, often poorly acted thriller, A Place Called Silence is the movie for you. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. — DEK