Silent Night

Really speaking Silent Night, actor Joel Kinnaman's straight-to-streaming action thriller, has two gimmicks. The first is that the film has almost no dialogue. This decision results in a story that is told in either the broadest possible strokes or ways that feel indirect and cumulative rather than momentary or incisive. We watch as a marriage dissolves slowly and with hardly a word spoken between the two parents, both trapped together and grieving a child that was killed in the crossfire of a gang war. Kinnaman's character, Brian - himself struck dumb by a more deliberately aimed bullet - sinks deeper and deeper into the isolated rhythms of vigilantism; one that combines the strongman prowling of Michael Winner's 70s pistol films with the urban estrangement evident in the films made about Los Angeles back in the 1990s. All of this meandering repulsion would likely fall completely flat where it not for Silent Night's second (and more powerful) gimmick: it's directed by John Woo. 

Now, while Woo could hardly be said to be at the top of his game when conducting the film's action - rather than the beatific destruction you might expect, Silent Night is a little more interested in digital knitting solutions that allow carefully arranged shoot-outs to become supernaturally prolonged - the filmmaker is, as ever, unwavering in his earnestness. Silent Night's description of fatherhood isn't one that seeks to right a wrong committed by a parent before their child was taken from them. Brian was neither absent or distracted in his home life, he was present and demonstrative. He loved his son and repeatedly expressed that to the youngster. In some ways, the unabashed emotional sincerity of Silent Night recalls the strange, immigrant interlude in Woo's misbegotten A Better Tomorrow II. Both films are premised on the concept of a decent person who is morally and linguistically alienated and therefore only able to respond to their circumstances through the universal language of American action cinema: screeching cars and smoking firearms.