I began by saying that The Silence is the most intriguing of Bergman's films, and I think that the reason why lies somewhere between its psychological concerns and its strange aesthetic. The film seems to inhabit the same hellish outer/inner world that would be seen in much of horror cinema: the crazed post-traumatic mind of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), the Freudian infernos of Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968), and through to its mainstream apotheosis in The Shining (1980). And going back to The Silence, as the young Jonas wanders the corridors of the strange hotel where his mother and aunt have disembarked, is it so hard to imagine them as the same corridors the young Danny Torrance explores in his pedal car in Kubrick's seventeen years later?
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
Thoughtful review. Well done