Mute Witness is a film of two halves, a theme we've seen many a time in the world of the movies. The first half is a tense, engaging, heart-pounding roller coaster with attributes of claustrophobia and genuine trepidation but the second sadly descends into silly fare that veers from being eye-rolling to being a strange kind of comedic farce.
A mute special effects make-up artist gets locked in a movie studio after hours and whilst there she witnesses a brutal murder. But after accidentally alerting the killers she must then try to evade their capture and escape the studio.
The first half of this film is nail-bitingly tense. After five or ten minutes of necessary introduction to our characters and the general story we get thrust into the tension when the brutal killing (which is pretty tough to watch due to the brilliant editing involved) takes place. Along with the main character we immediately want to get as far away from this terrible incident as possible but unfortunately our mute protagonist knocks over something and alerts the killers. The tension is then kicked up even higher as our main character gets chased about what seems like every nook and cranny of the studio. There are some visually arresting techniques employed to put the claustrophobia and anxiety across.
When running down a hallway the camera will literally run alongside the character being chased, as if we are another character in the film. This, along with what seems like a variation in colour in these specific scenes, makes the corridors seem twice as long as they are. This gives us a feeling of the chase being never-ending, as the entire cat-and-mouse game feels in general. Normally this would result in a film dragging but in this case it’s part of why it works so well.
Mute Witness could readily be described as a slasher film but that would lump it in with a group of other films, such as the Friday the 13th series, which would be unfair. Mute Witness aims much higher than that, feeling for the most part more like an art film than a Hollywood slasher/thriller. But at the same time, because of its descent into silliness, it’s not completely devoid of the problems that slasher flicks commonly have. It starts off extremely well, so well in fact that it allows me to forgive what it does so very wrong in the latter half, but ultimately changes course and becomes either boring or silly (or perhaps both). And it irritates and disheartens me that it does take such a nose dive, because had it continued on the way I was hoping it would have been one stellar little flick.
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