A homicide detective struggling with hearing loss must protect a deaf witness in The Silent Hour, now available for rent or purchase on Apple TV+ and other VOD streaming platforms. This take on similarly-conceived thrillers like Wait Until Dark, Mute Witness, or Hear No Evil one-ups those films by adding a second protagonist suffering from sensory impairment, and succeeds despite the familiar trappings thanks to efficient and genuinely suspenseful direction from Brad Anderson.
The Silent Hour stars Joel Kinnaman (in his second straight silent-themed feature following John Woo’s Silent Night) as Frank Shaw, a homicide detective who opens the film tracking down a murder suspect at a shipyard alongside partner Doug Slater (Mark Strong). But a chase through narrow shipping containers leads to an accident that leaves Shaw with a serious head injury.
The implausible physics of this inciting incident—which require a pickup truck to come to a complete stop quicker than Kinnaman’s running detective—are almost enough to put one off the movie (any other on-duty accident would have been an improvement) but The Silent Hour doesn’t waste too much time getting to the meat of the story.
Some months later, Shaw is struggling with auditory loss and can only hear anything through the use of a hearing aid. He’s mired in depression, but lured out into the field by old partner Slater to help question a deaf witness who witnessed a drug-related murder when the official sign language translator isn’t available.
The witness, Ava (Sandra Mae Frank), not only saw the murder but recorded it on her phone. Minutes after turning over the evidence to the detectives, however, she finds herself ambushed by the killers, led by Lynch (Mekhi Phifer). But Shaw, who accidentally left his phone behind in Ava’s apartment, makes it back just in time to prevent another murder.
The vast majority of The Silent Hour unfolds in a barren apartment complex, as Shaw and Ava navigate empty corridors and abandoned apartments, climbing through elevator shafts and out fire escapes. The killers have multiple lookouts on the bottom floor to prevent their escape, and for multiple reasons, they’re unable to signal for help; Ava being deaf and Shaw having the batteries on his hearing aid run out don’t help the situation.
The Silent Hour is essentially Die Hard meets Wait Until Dark, with a dash of Walter Hill’s Trespass, and despite a shaky setup it’s completely engrossing once the stakes are set. Partial credit for that should go to Kinnaman, who is unusually empathetic in this role, but especially Frank, a deaf actress and advocate for deaf actors who elevates the material above the usual B-movie fare.
Director Anderson, too, imbues The Silent Hour with a level of craft that belies what otherwise seems like your standard thriller, resulting in a suspenseful experience right through the climax. He’s made a habit out of turning out above-average genre fare in films like Session 9, The Machinist, The Call, and Stonehearst Asylum, and The Silent Hour is a more-than-solid return to form after the middling Blood.
The Silent Hour has dropped on VOD with little fanfare, but don’t sleep on this one: it’s a taut and exciting little B-movie that combines a first-rate presentation with some resonant themes about victimhood and depression. Genre films don’t get much better than this.
One Response
What i don’t understand is why these crooked cops don’t immediately ice her? Like they have no trouble killing two others in public with witnesses (hence the need to clean up) but when they get her alone in an abandoned building they want to stage this elaborate drug overdose?