The journey to the screen for director Mark Greenstreet’s mystery thriller Silent Hours involved several altered pedigrees over the course of half a decade. It was initially cut as a feature film in 2015, then reconfigured as a three-part miniseries for television in 2020, and has now been re-edited as a stand-alone feature. The result feels like a bit of a reheated breakfast, with a surplus of incident chopped up with inconsistent pacing that sometimes drags and sometimes skips key events, much like the protagonist’s troubled mental state.
John Duval (James Weber Brown) is an ex-lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy who retired after a crack-up at sea and now works as a private investigator in dreary Portsmouth, England. He’s all business when it comes to running down a case, and business for him includes plenty of fucking. Driven by ego, lust and a trove of dark secrets, he appears to stumble on an interconnected string of brutal murders when he takes on an infidelity case from an acquaintance. Three women are dismembered and arranged in gruesome poses in the span of a few days, and his own snooping renders himself as the prime suspect. Police Detective-Inspector Jane Ambrose (Dervla Kirwan) keeps hauling him in for questioning and consultation, while hiding some of her own secrets. The fact that Duval slept with some of the victims the very night they were murdered casts an inconvenient shadow on his investigation. Even worse, he’s prone to blackouts, and he has no alibi at the times of death. It’s a great, thorny set up for a murder thriller, and the atmospherics work in stretches once the teeth of the plot gears start turning. But some script miscues, anemic editing and an overused score drain much of the tension even before the baffling misfire of a twist at the end.
What the film does have going for it is the sense of call-back to some of the great erotic thrillers of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Like Basic Instinct, Body Heat and Scorsese’s Cape Fear, Silent Hours gleefully parades its horniness. Few Hollywood movies of recent decades bother to give their characters much sexual dimension, but this British production features characters shagging in scene after scene – often as a prelude to one of them winding up dead. But for all the rutting Duval does, his greatest attraction seems to be for his court-ordered therapist, Dr. Catherine Benson (Indira Varma). The magnetism between the two is palpable, made all the more enticing by her easy flouting of her own rules about appropriate behavior: her refusal to allow smoking during the sessions evaporates as Duval defiantly lights up, and it’s not long before she’s sucking on her own cigarette and leveling a smoky stare at her patient.
Of course, the bad behavior doesn’t end with the smoking, and any veneer of realism the film cultivates around these people’s professional conduct is ground up in the gears of melodrama as the plot advances. One impediment to the film’s coherence is the score, which feels repetitive and omnipresent, and which occasionally drowns out the dialogue during key moments of revelation, as if the filmmakers learned all the wrong lessons from Christopher Nolan. If you don’t have subtitles and can’t read lips, you might entirely miss the secrets revealed in the final act as the horns moan and the strings tremble.
The already hefty runtime of 165 minutes feels even more attenuated by the constant use of crossfades within and between scenes, which, coupled with the recycling score, creates a sense of montage and distance from the immediacy of events. At its core, Silent Hours is a tense and sexy thriller tightly wound around an unreliable and compelling protagonist, but stylistic choices undo much of the story’s potential appeal. There is surely a tighter film buried within these layers, but it would take yet another round of clear-eyed edits to reveal it.
The post Silent Hours appeared first on Spectrum Culture.