TIFF 2021 Review: Silent Night

Silent Night (2021) is a British black comedy. It was written and directed by Camille Griffin.

Silent Night begins in a posh house, somewhere in England. A large meal is being prepared. Chickens are being tossed over the fence. Various couples are en route to the chateau in a variety of vehicles. The house is festooned with Christmas decorations, including but not limited to a fully decked-out tree. On the radio, Michael Bublé sings some completely annoying drivel about Christmas sweaters. Yes, it is Christmastime in the English countryside.

Nell (Keira Knightley) and her husband Simon (Matthew Goode) are preparing the family home for the onslaught of imminently arriving guests. Steadily they all begin to arrive. As they do, they exchange pleasantries and air grievances. The mood is festive, for what appears to be a nice holiday gathering of friends and family. The joy in the air is merely a façade however for the grim proceedings that are about to unfold.

A strange and mysterious cloud of gas is ravaging England, leaving a trail of corpses in its wake. In an effort to spare their citizens from a grisly demise in Mother Nature’s gas chamber, suicide pills have been issued for everyone. Once the gas begins to encroach, the pills offer a supposedly quick and painless exit from life, so none have to suffer the agony of death at the hands of this bloodthirsty fog.

This Christmas party will not only be one to celebrate the holiday, but will also be a suicide party, Heaven’s Gate-style. The various families and loved ones will celebrate their departure from this mortal coil with one last shindig. However, when Simon and Nell’s son Art (Roman Griffin Davis) has the temerity to question the status quo, things take an even darker turn.

I’m not quite sure how to feel about Silent Night. It felt long to me, even though it had only a trim ninety minute runtime. The story is very slow to build, as the various friends arrive at the house. The first half of the film is mostly semi-witty small talk that doesn’t do much more than demonstrate that the majority of the characters with whom we will spend their last moments on Earth, are naught more than caricatures. There are quite a few jokes, too many of which fell flat for me. There is some insignificant interpersonal drama discussed, and there is much profanity. Sadly, none of it is good for anything other than padding the script out to feature length.

The concept itself is interesting, but so much of the film is spent listening to annoying people be annoying that the thing that is basically the centerpiece of the film is almost an afterthought. This could be fine if the film were full of thought-provoking musings on the nature of life and death, or on the significance of relationships and experience in what is basically a meaningless, temporary existence on this particular plane. Against the backdrop of the house guest’s respective appointments with the reaper, all we get is some light humour (I spelled it the British way on purpose cuz this is a British film!)

As a result, by the time the story does become slightly meatier, they had already kinda lost me. This isn’t to say that the film does a 180 and suddenly becomes quite deep and reflective. It does take itself a little more seriously at a certain point, and dares to dip its toes in the philosophical kiddie pool, but by no means does this turn into a Jodorowski film.

Silent Night bills itself as a black comedy, but its primary conceit is more science fiction than anything else. Unfortunately, for a black comedy, it ceases to be funny about halfway through. The performances are all decent, the cinematography is satisfactory, and it is an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I found the film to be sort of like how Bilbo Baggins felt in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 1999): it feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

Hilariously, once the film does dare to question the nature of things directly, it almost comes across as the world’s first work of anti-vaxx filmmaking. By no means do I intend to accuse Camille Griffin of being an anti-vaxxer, nor am I insisting that this film exists to push an anti-vaxx narrative. She herself said in a short video prior to the film that this work, much like the superior The Pink Cloud (Iuli Gerbase, 2021), was conceived and written prior to the pandemic. Nevertheless, I was definitely struck by the very real potential of this film to be misinterpreted in that way, assuming that it was a misinterpretation.

It is highly likely that in today’s climate, I couldn’t help but see things through Covid-colored lenses. In fact, thinking about it after the fact, I can think of different, equally valid potential intentions behind it. However, during the film itself, the company I watched the film with, as well as myself, independent of one another, came to the same conclusion. Additionally, it had me curious if Covid-fiction will become the dominant canvas of artistic expression over the next few years.

When all was said and done, Silent Night wasn’t a terrible film. It was decent, and I don’t feel as if my time was wasted in consuming it. Unfortunately, it didn’t feel significant enough for me to feel like I had just watched something important; something worthy of continued thought and reflection. It was neither funny enough to be considered a comedy, nor heady enough to be a meaningful meditation on mortality. It had an interesting concept, some funny bits, and did offer some morsels of philosophical goodness for my brain to consume. There just wasn’t enough of it to push this thing over the top of the hill for me. Oh yeah, it also wasn’t very successful as a Christmas film either. Bummer, cuz I probably would have been happy to settle for that.