Silence (2016)

It took Martin Scorsese a full twenty-eight years to make this film. For a director who had dreamed of adapting it ever since reading Shūsaku Endō’s novel, Silence was less a mere project than something close to a lifelong assignment. That long obsession is steeped into every corner of the frame. This is neither a film aimed at the box office nor an easy one to watch. It is a weighty, painful religious epic that gazes head-on, for 159 minutes, at faith’s deepest and darkest question.

What it’s about — A priest who slips into Japan to find his apostate teacher

Set in seventeenth-century Japan, where Christianity was brutally persecuted. The Portuguese Jesuit priests Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) hear a rumor that their teacher Ferreira (Liam Neeson) renounced his faith under torture, and they slip into Japan to confirm the truth. The Japanese believers who have kept their faith in hiding welcome the two priests, but the shogunate’s oppression is merciless. The faithful are forced to step on holy images, and those who refuse die after horrific torture. Rodrigues sinks into ever deeper doubt before the paradox that his own faith is driving innocent people to their deaths.

Direction — Filling an unanswering sky with stillness

Scorsese is well known for gangster films, but the questions of sin, salvation, and faith have always flowed through his body of work. Silence draws that theme up most directly. Though a director famous for lavish camera movement, here he chooses restraint. Landscapes like a fog-shrouded sea, a mud-soaked village, and the waves at an execution ground unfold heavily within static frames.

As the title says, what matters most in this film is silence. When Rodrigues prays desperately for the suffering faithful, the heavens, in the end, offer no answer at all. Scorsese fills this silence of God not with music or explanation but leaves it as the sounds of nature and stillness alone. As a result, the audience comes to endure, in full, the despair and doubt Rodrigues feels. The long span of 159 minutes demands patience, but that patience itself touches the film’s theme.

Performance — Garfield collapsing from conviction into doubt

Andrew Garfield renders, in stages, the faith and doubt, the arrogance and collapse of the character Rodrigues. He persuasively performs the process by which a priest, at first filled with a conviction prepared even for martyrdom, comes to doubt before another’s suffering for whom his faith truly is. The weight of the choice he makes at the climax leaves an all the deeper resonance thanks to Garfield’s facial performance.

Ferreira, the teacher played by Liam Neeson, shakes the film’s whole center of gravity despite a short appearance. Neeson conveys, through a calm performance, that the words from the mouth of one who renounced his faith may be not mere apostasy but another form of revelation. The inquisitor played by the Japanese actor Issey Ogata, too, is a figure who pairs cruelty with logic, adding taut tension to the film.

What the film says — Why does God stay silent before suffering

The question Silence poses is by no means light, for believer and atheist alike. If God truly exists, why does He stay silent when the most faithful suffer? Is it right to sacrifice another’s life to keep one’s faith, or is saving a person, even if it looks like renouncing faith, the greater love? The film offers no easy answer of any kind. Yet through Rodrigues’s final choice, it cautiously leaves open the possibility that true faith may be not a matter of form but something that remains in the depths of the heart.

Ratings & reception

By OMDb, the IMDb rating is 7.2. The Rotten Tomatoes freshness score is 83% and the Metacritic score is 79, with high critical regard. Critics praised the grave direction born of Scorsese’s long obsession, Garfield’s devoted performance, and the stance of digging into the essence of faith without evasion. That said, with its heavy, slow pace and the lengthy depiction of suffering, its popular reception was limited.

Verdict

Silence is a film not for enjoying but for enduring and contemplating. Digging without evasion into the darkest valley of faith, this work demands no small patience and reflection from the viewer. But to the viewer who bears that weight, it leaves a question not easily forgotten. As the crystallization of a conviction Scorsese staked a lifetime to complete, four stars are no waste.

Recommended for

• Those who want a film that digs deeply into faith, doubt, and salvation
• Those who can endure a slow but weighty historical drama
• Those interested in Martin Scorsese’s religious thematic awareness