Synopsis
Silentium (2004) is an Austrian crime-comedy-thriller you can watch online on iFILM — director Wolfgang Murnberger's second film with the shambling detective Simon Brenner, adapted from Wolf Haas's darkly funny novels.
The setup: the son-in-law of a prominent Salzburg festival president is dead. Officially suicide. The Catholic Church is relieved, because the dead man had been about to publish a memoir detailing childhood abuse by a priest. His widow is not relieved. She hires Brenner — played with sleepy, off-kilter precision by Josef Hader — and asks him to prove it was murder. The city of Salzburg, famous for Mozart and tourism, turns out to have corners that fit neither.
Austrian cinema has a specific register — it holds grief and absurdity in the same shot without letting either cancel the other — and Silentium is one of the cleaner examples of that skill. Watch Silentium online on iFILM.
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