Silent Night (2023)

I've seen at least three genre films titled "Silent Night", and none were what I'd call a slam dunk. This comes closest, between John Woo's stylish direction, a clever gimmick, and an impressive performance from Joel Kinnaman - it's by no means a bad revenge flick, but the elements making this distinct don't overcome the ones making it feel generic. Specifically, the movie's sparce use of dialogue doesn't have the intended effect, so you're left feeling like the film is incomplete.

That's the gimmick, by the way: this has essentially no dialogue other than radio transmissions and video clips watched and heard by characters in the movie. I actually think this would have worked better if they'd found ways to cut those as well - the handful of spoken words we hear don't add much and water down the effect.

It's not that I found myself missing the dialogue itself - if there's one thing this movie succeeds in, it's demonstrating that dialogue is largely superfluous when it comes to action. The problem is the movie doesn't find ways to pick up the slack where bits of dialogue would normally act as a shorthand to develop the theme, as well as flesh out minor characters.

The premise and plot here is about as straightforward as this genre gets: a man's son is killed by a stray bullet from gang violence, then - after he chases down those responsible - he's shot in the throat and rendered mute. He spends most of the following year developing the skills to seek revenge, which he carries out the following Christmas Eve, ultimately sacrificing his own life in the process.

That's most of the movie.

The first half is largely Brian getting ready. He trains himself in a variety of skills you'd expect an action hero to need: firearms, hand-to-hand combat, weight training, and stunt driving. His wife (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) leaves him in the middle of this, though because their only communications are brief text messages, we don't really get a clear picture of what she thinks he's doing. We understand that Brian is neglecting to help her deal with her grief, but the movie's so hyper-focused on him, we're not really shown enough to grasp the nuances of what she's going through.

Same goes for Brian's relationship - or lack thereof - with a police detective (played by Kid Cudi) who teams up with him at the end of the movie. To avoid awkwardness around having him not speaking (the movie is largely a series of excuses not break its self-imposed "no dialogue" rule), they skip sequences that would otherwise explain this character's motives. At the end when he makes his way into the complex where the final showdown is occurring, he's such a blank slate you have no idea whether they're doing the "ally to the hero" cliche or the "twist villain" one... and frankly you don't care.

Both Kid Cudi and Catalina Sandino Moreno do good work under the circumstances, but the movie just doesn't offer them the time they'd need to turn generic stand-ins into fully realized characters. Same goes for Harold Torres as the gangster who shot Brian at the beginning: he's good on screen, but he's not really given much to work with.

Kinnaman's Brian fares better by virtue of being the movie's focus. We spend enough time with him to feel his inner conflict, his sense of loss, and the love he still feels for his son. But there's a flip side to this, too: I got to know Brian, but I didn't actually like him.

The movie struggles with the issue most serious revenge flicks run into: they don't want to be accused of glamorizing violence, so they show us the dark side, as well. The movie makes sure we understand that there's a cost to all this - that's basically what his wife is here for. The film ends with her reading a letter he sent apologizing for being unable to help her through a difficult time and explaining he was willing to sacrifice his life to try making what happened to their son right, even though that's impossible.

This is of course meant to humanize him, as are sequences where he experiences flashbacks and visions of his child. The problem I kept running into was that Brian's actions have a real chance of repeating the tragedy he experienced. As he goes on his John Wick-style killing spree, he inevitably winds up in high speed chases, public shootouts, and other encounters that aren't dissimilar from the circumstances causing the death of his son. Hell, a calendar he's marked up with his plans includes a note to himself reading, "Start a gang war?" A year earlier, that's literally what got his kid killed. I assume the filmmakers were conscious of Brian's hypocrisy (how could they not be?), but this doesn't make it onscreen.

Again, I suspect this is a casualty of the lost dialogue. Without words, there's no real room for any of this to be explored or dissected. The themes we're left walking away with are childish ones (i.e.: drugs are bad, revenge is justified but carries a heavy price, etc.) and a metatextual statement on how action movies don't need dialogue for motives and events to be conveyed.

That last one... is pretty successful, actually. The movie is compelling, visceral, and exciting. We understand at all times what Brian is trying to do, and we don't miss the dialogue during the fights (this genre has far too many one-liners, anyway). But it's not like action sequences without dialogue are new: comparisons between these and dance movies are commonplace at this point. As for the training sequences, they're just montages - those almost never have dialogue, anyway.

I don't want to dismiss the achievement of making a feature-length movie with virtually no dialogue. The film had to find countless solutions to avoid situations where characters would exchange words or even offer encouragement or condolences. And, to the credit of both John Woo and writer Robert Archer Lynn, they managed this without it feeling forced or boring. The movie's pace and tone work beautifully, all things considered.

But as the credits rolled, I felt like the movie as a whole had been unsatisfying. It's a neat revenge flick, but ultimately a shallow one. And in this genre... "shallow" comes with some baggage.

That brings us to the subtext. The movie, for all its artistic flourishes, boils down to the same tired cliche of a working-class hero pushed too far taking revenge on those who wronged him. And, like far too many of these movies before, the hero is white and the bad guys aren't. It's the same tired, regressive story we've seen before, and - as I've already covered - it doesn't manage to explore any of that in a way that redeems it.

The filmmakers seem conscious of this, mind you. They take the usual steps to try and head off accusations of racism: the police detective is black, the hero's wife is Columbian, we see that crime is hurting the community... you know the drill. But the issues with this kind of narrative aren't solved simply by diversifying the cast of supporting characters. The narrative shows a white hero fighting invading Mexican criminals: presenting that kind of story without any serious deconstruction of its racist undertones is irresponsible, at best.

On top of that, the movie presents an inconsistent reality. At times, this seems to lean towards a grounded, realistic portrayal of how someone's misguided attempt to take the law into their own hands would backfire. A couple scenes later, the same hero is a virtually unstoppable killing machine, facing down an army singlehanded. The power fantasy stuff undercuts the serious bits, and the serious bits keep you from getting pulled into the power fantasy. None of it's bad in isolation, but cut together it's dizzying.

Now then. Let's talk Christmas.

The holidays are largely present for their focus on the role of parents and children. The death of Brian's son is naturally the event driving the movie - having the murder occur on Christmas day attempts to increase the tragedy and sell the character's rage. The movie also leans on the holiday action staple of juxtaposing the season with violence, again to increase the tension. This mainly is leveraged at the beginning, when we're introduced to Brian as he chases down his son's killers while wearing a ridiculous reindeer sweater.

The holiday trappings then stick around, even as the narrative technically leaves them behind for a while. Months pass, but neither Brian nor his wife take down the decorations: as a result, the holidays - and the associated traumatic event - seem to hang in the air.

We also see the film use the holidays as a sort of border between life and death, as Brian experiences flashbacks and hallucinations. As he dies, he literally sees these images appear in massive decorative balls the villain has in his base. This is a tad silly and not all that effective, but it ties to a tradition of the holidays being a time for ghost stories, as well as mundane reflection. There's a little bit of Dickens in all this, too, as he sees visions of the past and of an alternate future.

Other than that, Christmas is less visually apparent than you'd expect given the film's title. The movie is set in Texas, so there's no snow to mark the season. Likewise, the movie tends to shy away from decorations during Brian's Christmas Eve rampage. John Woo indulges his love of symbolism and exaggerated realism, but aside from those giant decorative balls (which felt a little out of place, honestly), he reserves embellishments for action tropes, rather than yuletide ones.

I almost feel like half the reason this is set at Christmas is to take advantage of the pun in the title.

Interestingly, this isn't the first Christmas action movie with a mute protagonist. This is better than the 2018 film, Mute, in most respects, but I think I had more fun with that one. They're very different movies, aside from some superficial similarities.

And speaking of similarities, Silent Night had the misfortune of coming out the same year as No One Will Save You, a far superior film employing an almost identical gimmick. It's unfortunate for us, too, because No One Will Save You wasn't set at Christmas, so I don't have an excuse to say much more about it. But it certainly demonstrated the approach could be used to tell a much more powerful story.

Needless to say, I found this a little frustrating. There's some great craft on display, as well as an impressive lead performance. But a movie without dialogue still has to say something, and Silent Night has little to offer in that respect.

Comments