Silence Becomes You (2005)

What a waste of my time!!!

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

For me, 'Silence Becomes You' is an example of why the production period in filming is so important.The idea itself is a very interesting one: Two sisters, haunted by the memory of their eccentric father, decide to ensnare a drifter for an unspecified purpose.It is an intriguing setup, that has potential to go into some very spine-chilling directions - and to the film's credit, when it does it is not only suspenseful but wonderfully surreal.The problem, however, is that what happens in-between these moments are disjointed with what seem to be big chunks of the story left out - implied supernatural elements that don't go anywhere & shifts in tone and mood that immediately deflate whatever tension was built up, among other things. The fact that there was a planned plot twist (in which the father would be revealed to be still alive) that got cut due to time restraints, is to me further proof that the film is not so much pretentious but incomplete.All that aside, the film is skillfully edited and beautifully shot. Leigh Lawson is nothing short of magnificent as the enigmatic father, standing out in the limited time he is on screen as a half-mad mix of Orson Welles and John Huston that was a delight to watch every time he appeared.While it is far from being a magnificent film, the bones of one are most definitely in there. Given a little more time in production (and perhaps a slight trimming down on it's more eccentric ideas), I have no doubt the 'Silence Becomes You' would have been a very successful first movie for the director.

same recipes. interesting atmosphere. and only sin is the too large ambition of director to present more than it is reasonable in this case. result - a not coherent story. seductive images and a thin plot. the atmosphere seems more important than story. every image, every reference is pillar for a dark portrait who has not beginning or end. and that is the basic problem because the entire work is almost a web without spider. the acting is prisoner of plot. and the plot is confuse and chaotic. short, a nice film and for the fans of genre a good oasis. but it is not enough. maybe, for possibilities of subject. and for actors who deserve better roles and opportunities to do a work with reasonable result.

I watched this on a lark on Showtime when I got home from work to kill a little time before bed. The description made it sound like an interesting taut thriller. Instead I was subjected to a meandering goofy ill-conceived premise with no meaty plot, but lots of artsy cinema shots.This movie had that sort of pretentious "if you are smart enough you'll read our minds to get something from this drivel" delivery that I often got in college from overzealous gender-studies or other irrelevant liberal arts classes. You know the ones, they put half a breast on a piece of paper and you're supposed to get that it symbolizes a repressed woman held under a sheet of ice under the Eiffel Tower by Neptune-"how can you not see that? You must be stupid!"Avoid this unless you REALLY REALLY want to see the actress who plays Grace "grace" you with her pleasant to look at upper half. Be forewarned, you'll have to get through about 3/5 of the movie to get there. Tivo it and fast forward. I'm only giving it a two for the assets you get to see about 3/5 of the way through the movie. Fast-forward is your friend!

Yes I am the type that reads the back of the DVD case but I never expected what I didn't get. I loved the images of the twisted fairy tale but, the movie seemed like someone had yanked a page out of a Gothic teenagers dreams. I did not understand what the title had to do with the story. It seems that the writer of the film scammed some imagery from Francesca Leah Bloch. This movie seemed to have jumped off the twisted pages of this woman's retelling of fairy tales in modern day terms. All the princesses are schizophrenic and the princes are handsome, screwed up and bipolar. Good luck if you can make sense out of this hodgepodge of victorian furniture, hippy rags and twisted sisters. Toward the end I did begin to understand the older sister and the description of obsession on the back of the box.