In 2003, the debut film of director James Wan took the horror genre by storm. Saw and its enigmatic, ethically-driven serial killer mastermind, Jigsaw, was immediately cast into the annals of horror villains as he became the twenty-first century successor to Hannibal Lecter’s reign upon the close of the previous one-hundred years. It would take Wan four years to produce his sophomore effort, Dead Silence, which–like most follow-ups to startling groundbreaking entries–was preceded by much weight and expectation. Unfortunately the gifted director attempted to play the safety and opted to mimic what made Saw so phenomenal and, not surprisingly, lapses into tired lethargy as a consequence.
When Ella Ashen (Amber Valletta) is mysteriously killed after her and her husband, Jamie (Ryan Kwanten), receive an ominous package containing a ventriloquist dummy, Jamie attempts to clear his name amid Detective Jim Lipton’s (Donnie Wahlberg) suspicions. The two males soon find themselves shrouded in local folklore as the case becomes stunningly exacerbated.
As my review of Saw attests, I truly admire what Wan achieved with his debut. If nothing else, few films–horror or otherwise–possess enough girth and prowess to adeptly sustain two sequels. Thus, I admittedly had high expectations for Dead Silence, hoping that the visionary director and his cowriter for both films, Leigh Whannell, would–not necessarily trump–but at least rival their initial cinematic outing after having almost half of a decade to maturate. Yet the horror team digresses and sadly consents to formula as they attempt to tread in the footsteps of their own groundbreaking work and, subsequently, produce a lackluster film by the bar they themselves had set.
Granted, Wan wryly plays with his audience as the Achilles’s heel of the plot revolves around screaming. Put simply, you are safe if you restrain from the vocal ramifications of instantaneous fright much in the same manner that you are safe if you don’t watch the deadly video in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu/Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. Furthermore, Wan and Whannell are to be commended for somewhat successfully merging the essences of a haunted house tale, local legend, a ghost story, and a mystery into a fairly coherent whole. Lastly, the various motifs, the foremost of which involving mirrors, are succinctly utilized to their full, terror-inducing potential.
However, for all of the minute elements which are often the polish following a steadfast plot, Dead Silence tries to be too clever as we begin to feel as if we are being set-up. In the wake of Saw, the audience starts its search as the drive to beat the filmmakers to the explicatory finale precedes the story which, in itself, is left to arbitrary conjecture. Regardless of the legitimacy and validity of the events contained within, and the culpability of various participatory parties, the work comes to nil and, as such, becomes all the more disappointing after Wan delivered Jigsaw, a serial killer whom, much like Theodore Kaczynski, baffled us by forcing us to consider whether or not murder can be enacted with ethical direction or purpose. To put it bluntly, what makes Saw truly great and aesthetically daunting is its energy alongside its ingenuity, neither of which Dead Silence possesses.
As the film wore on, I begun to watch the crowd (never a good sign for a director, regardless of the viewer’s motivation for such) as I attempted to determine how a non-genre spectator was receiving the work. Indeed, the largely mainstream audience sat enthralled in anticipation of the revelatory outcome as many a trite “boo moment” came and went. However, a few labored sighs could be heard as the climax gave way to an extended, diluting scene which one inevitably gets the feeling was tacked on the now-overlong feature as an attempt by Wan to keep from having yet another franchise added to his resume.
Thus, when all’s said and done, James Wan’s Dead Silence–with its equal parts Peter Medak’s The Changling; Alberto Cavalcanti’s segment in Dead of Night, Tom Holland’s Child’s Play, Don Mancini’s Seed of Chucky, and (almost plagiaristically), Sandor Stern’s Pin. . . ; Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, and the director’s own Saw–culminates into a rote, modern day horror outing complete with a cute plot twist at the end, which–and all too despondently concurrent to William Shakespeare’s Poor Player that is Life–struts and frets its hour and a half on screen, a work of silence and mundanity, a tale told by a one-time visionary, regrettably signifying nothing. Issuing benefit of the doubt, we can only hope Dead Silence is yet another stereotypical instance of a sophomore slump.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
