Written and directed by Barak Barkan
Starring Mina Walker, Joan Glackin, and Jordan Lage
Runtime: 1 hour 21 minutes
Unrated – disturbing themes, offscreen violence
Currently available for digital rental

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

Silence & Darkness, a taut debut thriller from writer/director Barak Barkan, starts by giving the audience the facts, told in a long take. We meet two sisters: one, Beth (Joan Glackin) is deaf; the other, Anna (Mina Walker) is blind. Anna communicates with Beth by signing into her palm. Beth watches recorded footage of gymnastics on the television, eager to try it out in the backyard. Anna listens to footage of Bob Dylan, which she uses to learn the songs on guitar. Anna and Beth live in a large open cabin-style home on a secluded estate in Vermont with their dad, the town doctor (Jordan Lage). Were they born blind and deaf? Where is their mom? How old are they? They look like they’re in their 20s but their father plays with them like children. And why are they kept so isolated from the outside world? 

Barkan keeps these questions vague for the majority of the film’s 81 minute running time. Even by the end, some things are left ambiguous. What did happen to their mother? Why does their father administer medicine to them, and what is it? In one scene, the girls attend a screening of Rear Window, Anna signing the dialogue into Beth’s palm while Beth watches the screen. Barkan never provides subtitles for the sister’s conversations, which adds to the growing mystery of the film. In addition to the lack of subtitles, Barkan doesn’t use any additional music aside from scenes of Anna and Beth playing guitar. That gives this quiet film, filmed among the lush mountains of Vermont, a deceptive calm to it. In many ways, Silence & Darkness reminded me of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, about a family that kept its adult children misinformed and sheltered from the outside world. 

Silence & Darkness is only as long as it needs to be. It unfolds in an intriguing, suspenseful way, and not a single scene is wasted. Each moment and secondary character serves a purpose. Things spin into motion when a babbling neighbor, Mrs. Bishop (Sandra Gartner) visits the family’s home after finding a suspicious bone on their property. Only Anna witnesses this encounter. Beth, of course, does not hear it. The actresses have chemistry together, but they’re limited as solitary performances. Anna and Beth could have used more defining characteristics outside of their disabilities. We never really see Anna’s growing suspicion of her father. Aside from Anna witnessing the conversation with the neighbor, is there something about Anna’s relationship with her father that would cause her to be more suspicious than Beth? Does he favor one over the other? Surely, even raised in isolation, they would have suspected the nature of their mother’s death earlier, or questioned the need for the shots their father gives them at bedtime. Additionally, actress Sandra Gartner, as the suspicious neighbor, struggles to make any of her lines sound remotely convincing.

My favorite scene of Silence & Darkness is something that I haven’t seen deployed in any other film. In the film’s final moments, we see what it looks like for Anna to walk around her home at night. Gone are the things that most of us would rely on to navigate the dark. Outlines of shapes with moonlight cast upon them. The difference between a white wall and a dark door. How a digital display from an appliance casts a glow across the floor. We hear the sounds of what we think is happening, and what we see looks like gray-brown static, with globules of black floating around. It feels like we’re walking in complete blackness, and we can’t rely on anything we see; those spots are likely functions of our bloody vessels or optic nerve than any object ahead of us. Silence & Darkness is a fascinating original film, carefully constructed and pieced together.