Taciturn
Swift shot: Castaway worked with very little spoken dialog, pretty much solely because Tom Hanks was the lead. He is a two-time Academy award winner, whereas Writer/Director/Actor Jeremiah Sayys . . . is not. Of Silence suffers from too much silence. There is probably a good hour of film that is dedicated to Colby just sitting there with all these semi-horrific noises and voices in his head.
There was just not enough exposition; too much was implied without actually explaining much of anything. For instance, the film jumps around from past to present with only a slight wardrobe change as a visual cue. The characters are basically an afterthought. Once I found myself curious about a character, they just kinda faded away. They had adequate air-time pumped in, but the tank was still surprisingly empty.
Colby (Sayys) never seems to really react to anything, he is just kind of walking around the whole time with the same basic thoughts, “I hear something, I keep seeing things, and everyone thinks I am crazy.” I am just guessing here, because I did a lot of guessing while trying to figure out this film. If it weren’t for reading the synopsis, I would have almost no idea that Colby was a scuba diver who started hearing voices, because he took a deep dive.
I know where Jeremiah was going with things, or I thought I did. I thought Colby’s crippling guilt was driving him insane. That would have made the most sense, anyway. That isn’t how it turned out. It got pretty far-fetched, to be frank.
Some of the editing left me more confused, and annoyed, rather than intrigued. When the “twist” (if you can really call it that) is revealed at the end, I just wasn’t invested in the story anymore. So, it came across as tacked on mediocrity.
Now, for folks into this new ASMR craze, this film will probably give you some tingles and chills if you watch it with your headsets on, because the audio editing was well deployed. In the end, I think what you have in Of Silence was an actor not really knowing how to react to the audio (because it wasn’t present at the time of filming) so the actor didn’t react much at all. At least the majority of the time. For me, if I was hearing voices like that and seeing phantasms like that, I would certainly not have a steady, distant gaze. If anything, I would be a twitchy sunavabitch jumping at everything and constantly worried I was losing my grip on reality.
After watching this film, I was filled with so many questions, and quite frankly, I didn’t really care by the end. The acting was good, and the story itself had some momentum, but the story-telling evaporated into the void.
I don’t want this review to discourage Jeremiah Sayys from making future films, and I hope he takes my criticism as it is meant . . . as a starting point for improvement. After all, isn’t that the overall role of a critic, not to be a prick, but to push creators to their maximum ability? Jeremiah has potential to be a great director, but his screenplay writing and storytelling skills need work.
