Silence

Silence is yet another movie about child abuse and rape and other things of that nature. However, it is not set in the usual manner. The movie starts like the setting of a post war torn area. All the battles have been fought and all that’s left is dead bodies hewn around and injured soldiers trying to determine whether to join the other bodies or to fight for life.

Silence is the story of a woman who was raped and abused by her father in her youth, all this while her mother was aware and did nothing. The story does a great job of showing the helplessness of the young girl from her youth into her adulthood. It shows how she attempts to fight and how she resigns hope when she truly realizes that there is no way out. From there she transcends past that, later in her life, to a point where she has absolutely no cares left.

Silence, to me, was very similar to a Shakespeare story. If there’s one thing that’s true about almost all Shakespeare stories is that everybody dies in the end. Even though everyone doesn’t necessarily die physically in this movie, almost everyone still dies in one form or the other.

The movie was probably one of the darkest movies I have seen out of Nigeria in a long time and it’s hard to classify it as either a Yoruba movie or just an English nollywood movie but whatever it is, it is a dark Nigerian movie.

As far as performances go, the movie had a strong line-up from Alex Osifo who embodies villainery to Biola Segun Williams who shows that helplessness and weakness of the mother’s character. Joseph Benjamin does alright as the husband there was room for more depth in his character or performance. More could have been done to show how he goes from a regular upstanding citizen to the rapist and morally devoid creature that he becomes.

Iyabo Ojo does well holding the central character but one thing that was hard to understand was the need for all of that ‘extra craze’ in the end. Some of the extra eye-rollings or forceful movements that are almost signature for Yoruba movies at this point were completely unnecessary when used here.

The movie ‘Silence’ had a very strong message that was conveyed quite poignantly in the end. Will I watch it again? Probably not because the movie was very dark.