Movie Review: ‘Silent Night’ (2023)

Director: John Woo

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Scott Mescudi, Harold Torres, Catalina Sandino Moreno

Plot: When his son is killed by a stray bullet produced by gang warfare, Brian Godluck spends a year training and investigating the local gangs with the intent of getting violent revenge.

Review: Going into a movie completely blind is always a better experience, unfortunately it’s not one we get often amid modern marketing tactics. Silent Night was actually an instance where we got to see it without catching trailers or early word. What made this an especially interesting experience was the unique concept of this action movie – this is a silent movie.

Let’s clarify and unpack that statement. The movie opens mid-action, with Brian Godluck (Kinnaman) running down some angry gangsters, the confrontation resulting in Brian being shot through the throat. He winds up unable to speak, something that we assumed was going to play into the unusual audio choices we’d already experienced. The main character being physically unable to speak seems to have little to do with the objective viewing experience, however, as all the audio in the movie is muted and the other characters dialogue is completely removed. It’s been said that there are many action movies that might as well be dialogue free for all it adds to the experience, perhaps something like John Wick could pull it off, so there’s room for an experimental filmmaker like Woo to attempt a silent action movie.

If we break down the handling of the concept things start to get bumpy. This isn’t a silent film in the classic Hollywood sense where the dialogue would be presented on title cards, instead we have the actors mouthing silently at each other without any substitute. On occasion they’ll cheat by putting text messages on screen, but ironically this isn’t needed. When Brian is ignoring his wife’s messages, it would be more effective to see him ignoring the messages instead of posting them on the screen for us to read. This would push the audience to engage because they have to think about it for a moment. Overall, the biggest issue with the concept is how the film-makers compensate for removing dialogue and sound by leaning very, very heavily into the performances and symbolism. Everything has to be spelt out very clearly for the audience, working on the assumption that any nuance to the story and characters would leave the viewers confused and angered. So we get long sequences of Brian slowly practising his knife moves from a YouTube tutorial so we can see exactly what and how he’s doing. If you like long sequences of guys training and learning to shoot and playing with knives, this will tickle your inner mall ninja.

We know that Kinnaman is very capable of delivering a nuances performance in an action role. The work he did with James Gunn in The Suicide Squad stands in contrast to the performance in Silent Night. There’s a great deal of mugging to the camera and overacting to ensure that we all know what’s going through his mind, making Brian feel like a fairly simple-minded individual. The climatic moment when an image appears to him at a crucial moments stands out as a particularly silly moment that derails the intensity of the movie. It’s not enough for the director, actor and editor to work together to communicate that the character is having second thoughts…we have to have the smiling face of a child magically appear to him in a giant Christmas bauble while he’s strangling a man to death. It’s…something. Moments like these, the really overt symbolism, starts to tilt into midnight movie territory.

I don’t relish putting the boot into a movie that has tried to do something new, attempting to strip an entire aspect of the film-making experience out of the process. It’s also cool than John Woo is making a return to the holiday system, and that Joel Kinnaman does great in the action genre. A grungier John Wick style film with a genuine stylistic choice is something we welcome. Unfortunately, the most unique aspect of this film is the thing that holds it back. The choreography and production of the action sequences are almost enough to carry it but when we get them intercut with a weird villain dance scene you lose some of the momentum. This doesn’t feel like the actions movies of the 90s that John Woo broke onto the Hollywood scene with, it feels like he’s evolved with the time and in Hong Kong and is returning with a real solid modern revenge film.

Woo’s skill and experience almost carries this through, but the efforts that they go to in order to compensate for the lack of dialogue only emphasise how much they needed it to tell this story. I think this can be done, but with a world and story built visually from the ground up.

Rating: FIVE out of TEN