Baran bo Odar won two awards in the category of Best New Director for his student feature film Under the Sun (Unter der Sonne), which he worked on with Nik Summerer. The Silence (Das letzte Schweigen) is born out of the duo’s powerful cinematic language and refined craft of using nuanced visual images to reach inside the characters’ psyche. The film handles heavy subject-matter with sensitivity and a quality of empathetic acting that pulls the audience along with the characters at the crescendo of the picture.The tone of the film is taut and eerie throughout, and is intensified by slow but considered dialogue played out with perceptive sensitivity by the whole cast. Nik Summerer’s cinematic skill is complemented by the intensity of Michael Kamm and Chris Steininger’s music. The case unfurls alongside the lives of the characters, and the two are agonisingly entangled. Sweeping landscapes paired with intimate visuals that seem to live alongside the characters provide a contrast that shows the skill of Odar’s cinematic language. Gaps and distances in the vast landscapes portray the isolation and loneliness of the people within them, who feel so distant, yet are closer and more interconnected than they could imagine.
The film ends with the same sense of tension and emotional stagnation with which it begun. Though some answers may have been given, not every wound can be healed in this uncertain conclusion. The pain and anguish of the ensemble resonate throughout this moving, often terrifying picture.
