Silencio movie review & film summary (2018)
Now, decades later, Ana (Melina Matthews) is a therapist and mother, who doesn't know about her previous quasi-resurrection through stone-holding time travel. But she now takes care of her grandfather James, his mind “asleep” as he sits staring off into space in their home in Mexico. One of Ana’s patients, Matthew (Michel Chauvet) tells Ana that her sister Lisa (who died in the accident along with the rest of the family) wants her to “wake up” her grandfather and find the stone, which James buried somewhere years ago, but forgot where. She is able to wake him up, by saying the word “three” three times to him, but in his limited hours of consciousness he can’t find the stone in the cemetery where he buried it.
But wait, there’s more: Someone else who wants the stone sends a hired hand to pressure the family, who goes so far as to kidnap Ana’s son Felix (Ian Garcia Monterrubio), whose asthmatic condition is later piled onto the script's teetering heap of stakes. When James is knocked out during one of the movie’s over-baked moments of violence, it’s up to Ana, Matthew, and the ghost of Lisa to find the stone, using an old map. They receive some help from Peter (who now lectures about the Zone of Silence, and is played by Rupert Graves), who speaks to Ana about the stone's abilities midway through the movie. This is about the only time “Silencio”’s self-made metaphysical rules make sense.
Along with an ever-assertive score, the performances are suffocated by the film's melodramatic ambitions, putting actors in lose-lose scenarios: Noble’s absurd passage when he scuttles to find the stone constantly verges on overacting. The same hamminess comes in later character revelations, big twists that are also unraveled by logic when you think about them for more than two seconds. As Matthews becomes the lead to the script's mess of convoluted character arcs, it becomes exhausting to try to feel something from "Silencio," never mind watching a lead try to simply make sense of it all.
