From the horror section of the Paris International Film Festival comes a creepy and unsettling film in ‘Silent River’, from director Chris Chan Lee.
Set in the dead silence of the desert wilderness, we follow Elliot (West Liang) who is on a mission to meet up with his estranged wife. For the audience, not much is known about her, other than they’ve been living at a distance for a while and communication has now become difficult. This all feeds into his desperation and urgency to cross the country.
Stopping over in a motel, Elliot meets Greta (Amy Tsang) who is the spitting image of his wife Julie. Seemingly now stuck in the motel and unable to leave, Elliot begins to investigate who this mysterious woman is, and where she came from.
From the moment Elliot arrives at the motel, events begin to unravel and there is an uncertainty about whether what we are seeing is real or imagined. The motel itself has a car park full of cars, yet appears to be almost deserted apart from the indifferent restaurant staff. Greta thus sticks out and bearing such a resemblance to Julie, as well as being situated in the next room, she becomes a focus for Elliot.
The tale plays out at a glacial pace, which as we weave between dreams, visions, and potentially real elements sometimes works and sometimes meanders just a little too much. With a running time of two hours, you definitely feel that the narrative could have been told in 20 less minutes and made it a more compelling affair. Not that there’s anything extraneous been added, but more that it hangs on certain shots and sections for way too long.
The majority of the film is really built on the soundtrack with long extended shots only gaining meaning from the way the score ebbs and flows underneath. It utilises a mixture of traditional instruments and sound effects to create an eerie soundscape that gives it its general air of unease and sense of being another world. Composer Brian Ralston has obviously spent a lot of time considering how best to accompany the mundane imagery of the motel to give it the edge where we don’t quite know what’s happening. Without that score a lot of scenes just wouldn’t work.
Silent River is essentially aiming for that Lynchian feel of nothing being quite what you expect it to be, and drifts between various states in a search for meaning. There are some nice little twists in the tale, but some parts are never really explained satisfactorily. Even when they are, you feel there is a whole other avenue the film could have explored, leaving several very clear missed opportunities staring you in the face.
That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have an evocative nature, as it does achieve quite a lot of what it sets out to display. Overall though, the slow pacing and the turns not taken rob this of achieving the heights it could have reached. It is definitely worth checking out though for the visual beauty of its shots, and the extremely effective score.
