Silence

Silence, Martin Scorsese’s so-called passion project, which took him over twenty years to bring to completion, is an unsettling historically-founded three-hour-long narration of the voyage of two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) to 17th century Japan in the attempt to find and save from persecution one of the Fathers of their church (Liam Neeson). While paying tribute to the missionaries’ unyielding courage and blind religious faith, Scorsese puts on display ruthless and unvarnished violence, alongside a detached and seemingly impartial depiction of the possible extremes and incoherencies of religion and of the simultaneous injustice and horror of its oppression.

Scorsese through each and every scene forces us to question the arguments both sides offer for their actions, to examine the rightfulness of the Christian obsessive promulgation and reinforcement of their faith and the inhumanity and horror of the killing that took place to oppose it. Silence, ultimately, is a scenographically magnificent, powerful and unforgiving portrayal of the suffering and persecution of the “Kakure Kirishitans” (hidden Christians), a brutal part of history often left untold and unexposed. With an incredible performance by Andrew Garfield (which did not receive the recognition it deserved), Silence is a film that will leave a mark on you whichever your faith.