Entertainment

‘The Silence’ review

Two men in the 1980s go for a drive down a country road. They spot an 11-year-old girl on her bike and follow her to a deserted field. One man gets out of the car, runs after the girl, wrestles her to the ground and rapes her, with her every pitiful cry echoing on the soundtrack though she’s mostly out of frame.

When he’s done, and she tries to claw his face, he kills her with one sickening blow to the head.

Thus begins “The Silence,” a German police procedural that takes up this crime 23 years later, when another girl disappears on the anniversary of the first murder. It is a handsome film, shot in the muted palette that declares Serious Intent, with actors giving thoughtful performances.

Yet director Baran bo Odar puts all this in the service of ghastly clichés. The rape of children has long since grown nauseatingly familiar, in books, in films, in each season of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

I am bone-weary of victims who are always wavy-haired, coltish preteen beauties, as though no spotty-faced, unkempt, awkward young girl was ever assaulted — or mourned. I am even wearier of point-of-view shots that mimic the pedophile’s gaze, of maudlin rubbernecking at the guilt and grief of parents.

These are our modern tearjerkers, embellished with sexual violence to maintain the audience’s sense of its own sophistication. Include me out.