While it’s undoubtedly true that every era of cinema likely produced more mediocrities than masterpieces, the dirty little secret of our streaming era is that never before have so many uninteresting films been so readily available — a veritable bounty of junk is literally a button away at any given moment. Every week, another forgettable piece of content drops onto a platform and is immediately memory-holed into the gaping maw of a collective disinterest. If that sounds unduly harsh, it should be noted that The Silent Hour is not particularly, or even especially bad; it is competently shot, edited, and acted, with above-average sound design. And yet it never rises above merely serviceable. It’s the kind of movie you forget about even as you’re watching it, never to be thought of again once the end credits start rolling. It’s a shame, as director Brad Anderson has proven to an above-average genre director in the past. His best known film, Session 9, is a mainstay on spooky season watchlists, and The Machinist will likely always be remembered for Christian Bale’s startling bodily transformation. But since then, Anderson has flitted from the, well, serviceable (Transsiberian, Stonehearst Asylum) to the outright anonymous (The Call, Vanishing on 7th Street). 2022’s little-seen Blood suggested a return to form, but any promise that offered is here squandered; The Silent Hour looks and moves like an episode of a network TV procedural. It’s painless, frictionless, and unremarkable.
A brief introductory scene welcomes us to Detective Frank Shaw (Joel Kinnaman) and his partner Doug Slater (Mark Strong). They’re chasing down a suspect when Frank receives a head injury; fast forward a year, and Frank is now mostly deaf as a result of the accident. He has a hearing aid that restores some of the loss, but the device is fuzzy, always piping in static. Frank’s frustrations are obvious; he’s slowly learning sign language, but conversations with his teenage daughter Sami are difficult. Eager to help Frank get off desk duty and back on the street, Doug taps him to do some sign language interpreting. A young deaf woman has witnessed a crime, and they need to talk to her and gather information. Frank is reluctant to do the work — he wants to be investigating real crimes, and his sign language abilities are still rudimentary.
Once the detectives meet the young witness, Ava (Sandra Mae Frank), she too is unhappy that the police couldn’t be bothered to provide a professional interpreter. But Frank wins her over with his charm and a genuine entreaty to give him a chance (Kinnaman signing “I’m an old dog trying to learn new tricks” get repeated several times). Ava lives in a dilapidated building that is scheduled for demolition, so most of the neighbors have moved out and large portions of the premises stand there empty. It’s a desolate location, but Ava has nowhere else to go. Frank makes note of some Naloxone in her medicine cabinet, and assumes that she witnessed the crime while on the streets looking to score. Tensions are gradually dissipated and the police get their statement, but no sooner have Frank and Doug left than Ava is accosted by gang members, led by Mason (Mekhi Phifer). They want to know what she told the police, and if she has shown her video evidence of their crime to anyone else. Once they get their answers, they prepare to kill Ava and make it look like a overdose (as Frank suspected, she is indeed an addict, in recovery). But Frank interrupts them, shoots one of the gangsters, and rescues Ava. Now the duo is on the run in Ava’s mostly abandoned building, each navigating their disability while evading various enemy combatants. The plot thickens, as these things do; Mason brings in an underworld doctor played by Djinda Kane to treat his injured man, while Frank wonders how the bad guys could have figured out who Ava was so quickly.
It’s a solid setup for a modern Wait Until Dark, but the filmmakers can’t figure out how to wring any actual suspense from the proceedings. The identity of the killers is revealed fairly quickly, and once it is, it becomes just a matter of time for the true mole to be revealed (hint: it’s one of Ebert’s “rules” involving notable actors in small roles). Frank and Ava are on the run for much of the film, but Anderson doesn’t do anything formally interesting with the setting. There are a few set pieces, only one of which — a battle in an elevator shaft while machinery whirs away — quickens the pulse. It’s all pretty perfunctory, by-the-numbers stuff. There’s a pretty good movie from 2021 called See For Me that utilizes a very similar premise but replaces deafness for blindness and then proceeds to milk the idea for all its worth; no one here is bothering with that, instead dropping sound in and out of the soundtrack to emulate Frank’s malfunctioning aids. It’s solid work, but still very familiar (Sound of Metal used similar trickery to much better ends). Brief pauses in the action for Ava and Frank to explain there backstories to each other dissipate the already mild thrills, and the most interesting characters on display are the badass underground doctor (so fascinating that she seems beamed in from a different, better film) and Phifer’s conflicted bad guy. It’s all a misfire, and while anyone who checks it out likely won’t be too upset by the experience, they also won’t remember a thing about it a week from now.
DIRECTOR: Brad Anderson; CAST: Joel Kinnaman, Sandra Mae Frank, Mekhi Phifer, Mark Strong; DISTRIBUTOR: Republic Pictures; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: October 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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