Silent Land — Aga Woszczyńska
Silent Land bores by reveling too much in its own insincere cleverness, even if Woszczyńska and her filmmaking team show promise as visual thinkers.
“The island is safe, except for those who aren’t invited.” This quote from one of the natives on the Italian island where a rich and attractive Polish couple vacations just might reflect the key idea of Aga Woszczyńska’s feature directorial debut Silent Land. With a premise somewhat similar to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, an unexpected violent incident and the chain of reaction following the inciting event interrupts a peaceable European holiday. But unlike Haneke’s masterpiece, Silent Land bores by reveling too much in its own insincere cleverness, even if Woszczyńska and her filmmaking team show promise as visual thinkers.
Married couple Anna (Agnieszka Żulewska) and Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) don’t know how to have fun. Their idea of a good vacation is sitting in a backyard pool all day and never interacting with others. They are too bourgeois for anything like sightseeing, which sets their work break up for failure when there is no water at the pool on the property they rented. The property owner sends an undocumented Arab worker named Rahim (Ibrahim Keshk) to fix things up. He’s attractive and doesn’t always wear a shirt while he’s working on the pool, and that captures the attention of Anna. She looks at him a bit longer than she’s supposed to, though her gaze hovers unsettlingly somewhere between lustful and racist. Of course, those two aren’t exclusive, and in Anna’s case, perhaps they are even related in some sort of sexual exoticization of the Arab other (the power dynamics, too, can’t be ignored). Regardless, her way of looking pushes well past comfortability.
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