By Helen Creighton
At first glance, Certain Kind of Silence has the whiff of a certain kind of Stepford: vague parallels could be drawn between the classic 70s sci-fi The Stepford Wives and Czech director Michal Hogenauer’s tale of a young au pair slowly but inexorably drawn into an oppressive cult environment against her better instincts, resulting in the destruction of her initially independent and thoughtful personality. In this case, substitute for the uncanny US-based valley of Stepford and its inhabitants a small, smothering cult set in a wealthy suburban community in an unidentified and unidentifiable part of western Europe. It’s all a long way from sci-fi or even satire though, as the film’s final frames show. But we’ll get to that later.
Misha, a young Czech woman, is recruited as an au pair for the young son of a wealthy European family, whose household is best described as a mixture of top-to-toe dull as ditchwater, colourless Scandinavian aesthetics and an obvious preoccupation with control. At first it’s weird, but ultimately harmless rules about which colour dishcloths can be used to wash which colour dishes, which the now renamed ‘Mia’ (first sign of trouble there as Misha loses her first marker of her real identity) mocks behind the family’s back via Skype to her boyfriend back in Prague. She easily resists the father’s early requests to keep her passport and valuables. She has no issue saying ‘no’ to requests she finds distasteful. She shows she’s no easy mark for manipulation and resists the family’s first attempt to induce her to physically punish the son she’s employed to care for ‘for his own good’ and she abruptly quits and leaves in a state of distress at what she has witnessed to that point. We learn that beyond dishcloths and colour codes, the main rule of the house is total obedience, backed by a sinister maxim regarding the necessity of pain in achieving any desired outcome.
Alas, things happen, as things always do in this kind of film, to force her return to the family and eventual capitulation to what is demanded of her. Soon it appears that she has renounced independent thought, draped herself in beige, and become a fully signed-up member of what is revealed to be some kind of bizarre if unnamed family cult. Part of this involves a very brief sex scene which is as oddly colourless and devoid of life and passion as the furnishings, as Misha/Mia appears to succumb to a request to produce another cult member fresh out of the oven, so to speak. The family seem to be well on their way to turning Misha/Mia into an fantastically obedient robot for the cause, whatever the cause is, which is never really made clear, perhaps because it doesn’t really matter. A cult is a cult is a cult is a cult, as Gertrude Stein memorably never wrote.
Cut early into the narrative are brief scenes of Misha/Mia in her final form as beige-clad, dull-haired, dull-eyed cult member undergoing a police interrogation about the household which signals that things will get very, very dark. Which they do, although there’s little on offer in terms of gore, extreme violence or even raised voices. A significant act of violence takes place entirely off-camera. The worst horror is simply suggested by a character’s sudden absence, and a brutishly dismissive answer to a query into his whereabouts. It is entirely left to the viewer to imagine his fate. There are no sudden thrills or jump cuts, no blaring soundtrack or anything designed to make the viewer jump out of their skin. A Certain Kind of Silence instead provides a gnawing, low-level tension and a kind of slowly burgeoning moral horror. Fittingly, despite the psychological and physical torments heaped upon the viewer and certain characters, a preternatural sense of calm reigns throughout, even in the closing moments with the law closing in on the cult.
The film seems to offer an allegory on the dangers of conformity, the amorality of a go-along-to-get-along culture, or perhaps corporatism; again and again, the intense but quietly-spoken parents justify physical abuses on the grounds they are designed to render the abused individual obedient and thus successful in society. At other points it almost comes across as a treatise on how the rich may treat domestic employees as replaceable units rather than human individuals. It certainly explores the wider issue of how flexible a once upright individual’s moral compass can become in the right or rather wrong environment, where compliance with dubious requests is both praised and rewarded materially, while resistance produces less emotionally rewarding outcomes. Certainly we can all think of easy historical examples of this outside of a classic cult environment, anything from WW2 horrors to the US college prison experiments of the 1970s, so it’s not such a reach to interpret the film as reaching for a variety of wider issues than simply how cults operate. It seems odd to contemplate this precise scenario could be going on in nice neighbourhoods in western Europe, with such ostensibly ‘normal’, presentable (if dull) and successful people behind it.
That’s where I was wrong, as the final frames provide context that turn any perception of this as even a uncomfortable satire on its head and acknowledges a real life event that took place in Germany in 2013 as the basis of the storyline. Sobering stuff indeed. I did appreciate the filmmaker’s decision to leave this information until the final moments, as it allows the viewer a wider interpretation of the material than they might have otherwise if concentrating on it as a ‘based on true events!’ kind of show.
It’s certainly a very confident outing, with Hogenauer never once giving in to the demands of smash-bang, turn-it-up-loud mainstream entertainment values. The limited colour palette he uses throughout; the dreary grey skies, leaden oceans, the drab decor and drabber clothing of the faithful, creates a stronger sense of a group of people in the grip of an ideology to which they are required to subsume their entire identities and personal preferences, more than any amount of emotional flailing, bloodletting or noise could. The lack – of colour, of music and human passions, even of an identifiable location is what lends such an oppressive atmosphere and lingers in the mind long after watching. Highly recommended, with a semi-serious warning that you may never contemplate Scandi chic and beige v-neck cardigans in the same way again.
Certain Kind of Silence will screen at the Raindance Film Festival on 24th September 2019. For more details, please click here.