Silence

2016 Directed by Martin Scorsese

Pray with your eyes open

Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact.

Andrew Garfield Adam Driver Liam Neeson Yosuke Kubozuka Tadanobu Asano Issey Ogata Shinya Tsukamoto Ryō Kase Nana Komatsu Yoshi Oida Ciarán Hinds Béla Baptiste Michié Katsuo Nakamura Motokatsu Suzuki Yasushi Takada Ten Miyazawa Kaoru Endô Diego Calderón Shi Liang Miho Harita Hairi Katagiri Hiroko Isayama Yutaka Mishima Yoriko Douguchi Kansai Eto Shun Sugata Hako Ohshima Hideki Nishioka Show All…

Alternative Titles

Milczenie Boga, Мълчание, Silencio, ศรัทธาไม่เงียบ, Молчание, 사일런스, Silêncio, خاموشی

drama history

161 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 31

100
"Those five in the pit are suffering too, just like Jesus, but they don't have your pride. They would never compare themselves to Jesus. Do you have the right to make them suffer? I heard the cries of suffering in this same cell. And I acted."
I remember it vividly; like a memory still lingering fresh in the mind. It was my first time attending the sacrament of reconciliation, and I was just as nervous as the many other students lined up in waiting for their turn at the confessional. One by one, people entered and exited the booth with a degree of rebellion and solemnity. It eventually dawned on me that my time had arrived, and taking a…
Review by Karsten Runquist ★★★★ 8

I'm....hm....uh....
Writing about movies is hard lol, writing about Silence is hell.
At the ripe age of 22 I still don't know where I stand on religion, I just have a lot of opinions on it that nobody wants to hear about. But what I'm trying to say is I feel like with a film like this, a film as subtly extreme and exhausting as this, your view on religion is going to impact how you take in this movie. Which is why I think the most impressive part about Silence, aside from how it looks, is the objectivity of it, I think. It's taking you in with open arms and dragging you through a whole lot of honesty. Brutal ass honesty. I did a lot more thinking than I did feeling with this one and I'll definitely be coming back to it some day. Yet another classic gangster film from the one and only Martin Scorsese!
Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 10

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF GARFIELD
Review by maria ★★★★½ 11

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

andrew garfield and adam driver: *go through hell to save liam neeson and his soul*
liam neeson: me no christian no more me a weeboo
andrew garfield: please say sike
Review by adrianbalboa ★★★★ 2

nothing fills my heart up with joy quite like imagining marty scorsese watching the final cut of this movie with a big ol smile on his face cause it turned out the masterpiece he intended......bushy eyebrowed king im about to cry
Review by Evan ★★★★½ 7

This one is going to have to marinate in my brain for a few days before I even attempt to write down some cohesive thoughts. But I'll leave you with this: Holy Fucking Shit! Marty hasn't lost it one bit.
Also, that final shot...WOW! One of the best final shots I've seen in a film to date.
Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 4

Even on rewatch I'm still unsure what to say about this one other than I already see myself wrestling with it for years to come. Shūsaku Endō’s book itself is a masterpiece, a book about reconciling belief and inquiry, love and cruelty, calm and brutality (spoiler: you can’t), and out of it Scorsese has stayed faithful to it and sculpted it into an extraordinarily empathetic portrait of arrogance and endurance. Many have already compared it to Scorsese’s previous spiritual works Last Temptation and Kundun, but it’s closest relative for me is his criminally underrated Bringing Out The Dead, the story of a paramedic addicted to the high of saving life, but unable to endure the pain of death—late in the…
Review by katie ★★★★½ 3

Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver further prove they are two of the most convincing and diverse actors today. Unlike Hacksaw Ridge, in my opinion, the faith in this film was handled beautifully and very respectfully. I absolutely adored Silence.
Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 5

"Grace ﬁlls empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it." - Simone Weil
Preliminary notes - because like all great art, it is not consumable within a single experience. But where to start with a film as dense as this one? Reading 'Mizo on Mizo'* earlier, Mizoguchi stated in regards to 'The Life of Oharu' that "it takes several years before a true work of art begins to take shape." I don't think any of us need to be reminded at this point that Scorsese was developing this project since 1991, but it frankly feels like it (I consider this a huge compliment) - it's the most concentrated film of his career and…
Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 2

"Go on, then, Rodrigues, pray. But pray with your eyes open."
I remember reading a review of this when it came out that dismissively compared it to Shinoda's original adaptation, arguing on demonstrably woke lines that Scorsese's emphasis on Endo's rumination on faith came at the expense of the novel's critiques of colonialism. It struck me as a blinkered, surface-level reading of the film then; now, it seems downright oblivious. Scorsese has worked with strong scripts for so much of his career, but he communicates visually, one of the few filmmakers who can shoot impressionistically and expressionistically with equal skill. It is hard to ignore how both Rodrigues and especially Garupe recoil at every Japanese person who approaches them, instinctively…
Review by Brendan Michaels ★★★★½ 1

If you follow the career of Martin Scorsese loosely you would be fairly surprised that he would follow up his epic of debauchery and greed, The Wolf of Wall Street, with the tranquil, yet brutal Silence. But peering closer at some of the hidden gems of his filmography it was only a matter of time before he made Silence. Silence is a culmination of Scorsese’s themes of religion and faith that drive many of his films. It’s a tale of anguish, suffering, faith, agony, and reconciliation. Possibly Scorsese’s most harrowing of his films as the characters are put through hell to prove their faith which is the foundation of their lives. You will find no other film quite like Silence this year or any other year.

FULL REVIEW ON TALK FILM SOCIETY
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★½ 7

61/100
Las Vegas Weekly review, in which I remain quasi-objective and don't discuss the ways in which my atheism informs my reaction. For me, the experience was a bit like watching 9/11 truthers refusing to step on a copy of Loose Change—intensely admirable in the abstract, but faintly ludicrous in the particular. Consequently, I was absorbed but unmoved until Father Ferreira reappears, at which point Silence finally starts speaking to a heathen like me. Final half hour or so is sublime, and may well transform what had seemed like a sluggish route to that destination when I inevitably take a second look.

Recent reviews

Review by Greg Gottfried ★★★★½

I don’t have much to say but wow.
Review by joshmruz

Round 2 revelation
Review by vigneshneel ★★★★½

Embarrassed that there is any metric by which we can call this film a failure. We’ve failed Scorsese, we’ve failed cinema.
Review by Nathan ★★★½

I'm sure it'd have more of an effect on me if I were religious, but still remains a good film
Review by justinyob ★★★★½

apostasy is not epic
Review by Moraa ★★★★

عظيم فشخ اد ايه الايمان ممكن يخليك تبيع الحياه و تضحي بيها
بس علي جانب اخر خالص و من ناحيه تانيه
كسم الضحك الناس رايحه النار بردو احا
Review by Jedidiah Rose ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Martin Scorsese's long gestating passion project finally came into being in 2016 and it's a marvel to behold. This is the third movie Scorsese has helmed where the story revolves around the struggle of men and their faith, the setting here being Edo era Japan which is probably one of the worst times and places in history to be a Christian.
Though he adorns the most commonly seen promotional imagery for Silence Liam Neeson is more a bit player in this movie, this is more a story centred on Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver and particularly Garfield. Through him we experience the broad spectrum of man's emotions, the pain and trauma of his journey from start to finish of this…
Review by skyzar ★★★★½

J’aime beaucoup trop Andrew Garfield
Review by Brian Yatco ★★★★½

I’d argue that it’s more thought provoking than it is engaging, but this extremely challenging film deconstructs faith in an incredibly unique way that’s both profound and incredibly emotional.
Review by Anantha Krishnan

The second film I've seen this week dealing with God's silence, I found Scorsese's passion project to be a compelling watch, and a fine take on faith. Being a faithless man myself, I've always considered the lengths that believers go to in order to hold onto their faiths with much interest, and Silence (2016) allowed me to empathise with these people, in an epic tale about a clash of cultures, ideals, and dogmas.
Review by Ben Little ★★★★

Pretty long, interesting movie. Not entirely sure how I feel
Review by Juani_V

El silencio de Dios.
Se me vienen a la mente dos películas que hablen de la participación del Señor en nuestras vidas mortales. Luz de invierno (1963) de Ingmar Bergman y First Reformed (2017) de Paul Schrader. Ambas mantienen un dialogo muy cercano, ya sea por referencias, temas vinculados y la fe puesta en tela de juicio. Sin embargo, a pesar de ser dos grandes obras, el filme de Scorsese está un escalón más arriba.
¿Dónde está Dios mientras sus creyentes sufren? Esa es la pregunta que se plantea el personaje del Padre Rodrigues, y a su vez, nosotros mismos como espectadores. A través de actos horribles y crueles, la creencia y religión penden de un hilo muy fino, mientras…