Scream in the silence

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Movie
German title Scream in the Silence / Reflecting Skin (Reissue)
Original title Reflecting skin
Country of production UK , Canada
original language English
Publishing year 1990
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Philip Ridley
script Philip Ridley
production Dominic Anciano
music Nick Bicat
camera Dick Pope
cut Scott Thomas
occupation

The feature film The Reflecting of Philip Ridley from 1990 tells the rural life in the 1950s in Idaho , USA , from the perspective of nine years of Seth. His father runs a gas station. After telling his son about the existence of vampires , the boy is convinced that the widow Dolphin Blue from the neighboring house is a vampire. When his brother Cameron returns home from the Korean War , Seth tries to stop him from seeing Dolphin. Seth has to deal with a domineering, quarrelsome mother, a very weak, if gentle father with homosexual tendencies and the turmoil of prepuberty. In Germany, the film was initially released under the distribution title “Schrei in der Stille”, the new edition of November 6, 2009 was then also released there on DVD and Blu-ray under the original title “The Reflecting Skin”.

content

The film begins in an idyllic setting for the time being. Seth Dove and his two friends Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee) and Kim (Evan Hall) wander through golden wheat fields and admire a large frog they have just found. In their childlike innocence, the boys take a straw to inflate the frog and place it on its back in the middle of the path. When Dolphin Blue, the Dove family's neighbor, approaches, they shoot him with a slingshot, splattering Dolphin with his blood.

“Exploding frogs” is what they call this game, which they have not played for the first time. They are not aware of what they actually did, how cruelly they treated the animal senselessly.

Seth lives with his parents in a small house with a shabby gas station in front of it. His mother is an extremely neurotic person who constantly complains about the man and his gasoline smell, constantly fiddling with this weak, quiet person, even though she herself got him to open the gas station in the first place. Luke Dove himself would much rather have become a beekeeper . When Dolphin Blue complains to the mother about the wrongdoing with the frog, she forces her son to drink a gallon of water as a punishment. Then she sends Seth over to apologize to the neighbor, who was less angry about the dead frog than about the fact that the dress could have been ruined. The strange woman now tells him not only about her British homeland, where she tied cat bangers to the tail in her childhood, but also about her short marriage and her husband's suicide by hanging. She also shows him a box with memories of him, such as a tooth and hair, as well as a small bottle that she eagerly sniffs - it is his smell. When she “confesses” to him, according to an estimate of her age at 50, that she is actually already 200, this only confirms his conviction that she is actually a vampire.

A black Cadillac drives through the idyllic-looking area, with four men (Jason Wolfe, Dean Hass, Guy Buller, Jason Brownlow) in it, who stop at the Doves gas station. Seth serves them while his father is reading one of his beloved horror dime novels in front of the house . The young men look rather greasy in appearance, but have excellent manners. The driver watches Seth at work in the rearview mirror, then asks for his name and says he'll see him again soon after stroking his face in a strange, if not to say pedophile, way.

Meanwhile, mother Ruth Dove eagerly awaits the return of her older son Cameron, who is fighting in the Korean War , and longs for his return with an almost incestuous obsession.

In the meantime, Eben, one of Seth's two friends, is found murdered in the house well of the Doves by Seth while fetching a cup of water for his father.

Sheriff Ticker (Robert Koons) sends his assistant (David Bloom) to the Doves, who are interrogated. When the latter hints at Father Dove's past, the mother sends the boy Seth to the room, but the latter listens and overhears the deputy alluding to whether they would have married so early and quickly so that Mrs. Dove could save his reputation . Father Dove had been caught kissing a boy in a barn. Outraged, Ruth rejects this, claiming that he was not a child and was 17.

The father is desperate, later goes outside, first drinks gasoline, then pours it over himself and sets fire to himself - in front of his son, who only says a horrified "papa" and watches with wide eyes.

Due to these events, the adult son, Cameron, comes home early. At the cemetery, he and Seth first meet the sheriff, who takes the boy aside and asks whether his father has ever committed any pedophile to him. Meanwhile, Cameron meets Blue and speaks to her. The two lonely people fall in love.

Meanwhile, Seth and Kim discovers a stillbirth in a remote barn and thinks it is the wingless angel of the murdered Eben. After a brief argument about who should keep him, Seth pushes Kim away and takes the stillbirth home with him, where he consults her over the course of the days on what he can do to protect his brother from Dolphin Blue.

Later, Seth has to watch from a distance as the four men in the Cadillac drag his friend Kim into their car and drive away with him. Shortly thereafter, Kim is found dead. Kim's mother accuses Seth when he comes to her house of knowing more about the murder and forces him to keep saying that it is sinful. The sheriff present also suspects that the nine-year-old knows more than he admits.

Seth is afraid that Blue, with whom his brother is now together and with whom he wants to go away together, wants to murder his brother because, in his opinion, she is a vampire. He worries that his brother has apparently lost too much hair and has lost quite a bit of weight since he got home (possibly related to the atomic bomb tests he had to attend). He suppresses the fact that she has nothing to do with the death of his friends, can have nothing to do with them. When Kim was kidnapped, Cameron was in her house. Seth had seen this when he snuck into her house and ran away. At heart, he hopes that she would be the next victim. And shortly afterwards he actually meets Dolphin, this time not in dark clothes, but very brightly dressed, standing by the roadside. She tells him that she is waiting for a car and wants to go into town. “Hell can be innocence,” she says to Seth. The Cadillac comes by and the men stop in front of them. The driver asks Seth if he wants to go with him, and he refuses, another time, not today. The neighbor asks the men if they would take them with them and gets in with a smile.

Cameron and Seth later see several people from the village and the police standing around from the house. Cameron runs over and Seth follows. When Cameron sees Dolphin lying dead on the floor, he collapses crying over her corpse.

Only now does the boy realize what he has done and done to his brother, and he runs away through the wheat fields until he finally stops and screams his pain and despair from his soul. And that's where the movie ends.

The English title refers to the atomic bomb tests that Cameron attended, and one of the three photos he always carries in his wallet and one day shows Seth (the other two pictures show a blond pin-up he does not know and a photo of him with Seth). It shows a contaminated baby with silver discolored skin, in whose face you can reflect and which exerts a morbid attraction and fascination for Cameron.

Reviews

  • According to Steve Davis of the Austin Chronicle, it's a film with breathtaking blue skies and fields of Van Gogh gold. The film is reminiscent of David Lynch's " Blue Velvet " or " Twin Peaks ".
  • Desert News' Chris Hicks says one thing is certain, filmmaker Philip Ridley has seen too many David Lynch films. Shout in the Silence is like “Twin Peaks” viewed from a child's point of view, comparable to the golden wheat fields with an Andrew Wyeth painting.
  • Jury of Evangelical Film Work : “Ridley's symbolic film puts the claustrophobic narrowness of social relationships and the infinite space in which his obsessive characters have established themselves in an oppressive field of tension. […] The child's perspective holds as little consolation as nature, whose beauty does not promise utopian possibilities […]. As in van Gogh's blazing cornfields, the paths get lost in nothing - no one leads outside. ”- Film of the month June 1991 
  • Ronald Kruschak in “The great film lexicon: all top films from A – Z”: “Even if Ridley's neurotic-fatalistic worldview does not appeal to a large audience, the critics were deeply impressed by the former painter's dark work .” 
  • Michael W. Phillips, Jr. also wrote in Goatdog's Movies that Philip Ridley had apparently seen too many lynch tapes and that he seemed to have a penchant for the grotesque and macabre of confronting ordinary people with extraordinary situations. However, the difference to Lynch is that the behavior of the characters involved is less predictable. In screaming in the silence nobody behaves like a normal person and the viewer feels like in a freak show. In terms of the recordings, the film is overwhelming.
  • Lexicon of international film : "A visually stunning, in its shock moments as well as in the color dramaturgy ingenious, sometimes all too much in love with effects and symbolically turned out film debut, which wins the monotonous landscape an unreal beauty."
  • Vincent Canby , The New York Times , June 28, 1991: "[...] largely pretentious nonsense."
  • TV Spielfilm magazine describes the film as a “ surreal arc of evil”.

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. Online resource ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 5, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gep.de
  2. Ronald Kruschak (rk) in: Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf, Willy Loderhose (Hrsg.): Das große Film-Lexikon. All top films from A-Z . Second edition, revised and expanded new edition. tape V . Verlagsgruppe Milchstraße, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89324-126-4 , p. 2439 .
  3. Scream in the silence. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed February 1, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

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