Many films hinge on characters uncovering dark secrets by digging through the past, but few do so quite as literally as German film The Silent Forest. Set in 1999, the directorial debut of Saralisa Volm revolves around a forestry intern named Anja Grimm (Henriette Confurius), who pounds metal probes into the earth to collect soil samples in a stretch of forest where her researcher father inexplicably went missing when she was a child. The locals are unnerved by her poking around in these woods, especially within a particular manmade meadow that’s turning up some strange compositional findings. Before long, it appears that this soil may be hiding quite a bit of dirt on the local denizens.
The Silent Forest is a quiet, slow-burning film about the decades-long ripple effects of loud, frenzied acts of violence. When Anja’s presence causes the reclusive and cognitively impaired Xaver (Christoph Jungmann) to point a rifle at her and demand she leave the woods, it sets off a series of events that will unearth the German town’s grim history in a country brimming with ghosts from the past. In the wake of Xaver’s confrontation with Anja, a brutal murder occurs offscreen, the remnants of it only shown soaked into a pillow or oozing down a shovel. Elsewhere, the tranquility of nature is punctuated throughout the film not only with metal implements striking soil, but also with guns blasts cutting down wild boars which roam the area. But the violence that people commit against each other is largely hidden, the town’s true history something even the local sheriff August Zirner (Gustav Dallmann) goes to great lengths to keep buried.
Not everyone is in on the dark secret. Rupert (Noah Saavedra), Xaver’s nephew, used to play with Anja as a child when she visited these woods with her late father. She reconnects with Rupert here, who aims to help her smooth things over with his family and the other townsfolk. Though he’s loyal to his dysfunctional family, he has some big dreams, hoping to scrape together the financing for a Hansel-and-Gretel-themed tourist attraction in the forest. His pipe dreams coupled with Anja Grimm’s last name set the stage for one of the more interesting bits of dialogue, as Anja tells Rupert that, if you dig deep enough into the story and brush away the fantastical elements, it’s not hard to see Hansel and Gretel as miscreants from a bad household who broke into an old woman’s home and ultimately burned her alive in her own oven. The fairytale obscures the old woman’s screams, according to Anja, and so, too, do the stories people tell themselves dull the resonance of horrible acts.
With an early 20th century history as grim as Germany’s, hiding horrors for 50 years can take its toll. Rupert’s weary mother (Johanna Bittenbinder) reveals the truth to him, and the audience, midway through the film. Though one could argue that this early revelation of the central mystery saps the film of some of its tension, it does provide dramatic irony as we watch Anja search in vain for the truth of her father’s murder. And moreover, by revealing the truth to the audience so early, we’re left with ample time to contemplate the various conflicting loyalties that pull otherwise good people into bad situations. Despite a few missteps and occasionally languid pacing, the film offers compelling performances, stark atmosphere and bleak subject matter that helps make The Silent Forest a somber meditation on the malignancy of burying evil deeds.
Photo courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment
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