Film

The Silence

Other titles called The Silence: the 2010 film, the 2019 film.

  • Drama
  • Very dark
  • Strange
  • Slow-burning

Bergman's austere masterpiece follows three people trapped in a hotel as war looms outside and language itself breaks down. Ingrid Thulin embodies intellectual anguish; Gunnel Lindblom radiates sensual defiance. It's a film that feels like suffocation rendered visible—glacial, demanding, unforgettable. For viewers who want cinema to wound them.

TMDb rating3.8

If you liked this

Persona1966

Bergman's most hermetic puzzle: two women, one room, a crisis of identity and communication that deepens until language itself becomes suspect. If The Silence moved you, this will burrow deeper.

But The final act offers no resolution, only intensification. It demands absolute patience and rewards it unevenly.

Persona poster

Through a Glass Darkly1961

Another Bergman chamber piece, another family in crisis on an island as the world collapses inward. Tighter and slightly warmer than The Silence, but cut from identical cloth—claustrophobia, faith failing, love insufficient.

But Sixty-two minutes and not much happens. Some will find it a sketch; others will recognize it as purity.

Through a Glass Darkly poster

The Fire Within1963

Louis Malle's concurrent masterpiece about a man's quiet disintegration in Paris. Shares The Silence's dread and its refusal to sentimentalize despair. Devastatingly precise about why connection fails.

But A film about suicide that doesn't turn despair into nobility. It's relentless. You will not feel better when it ends.

The Fire Within poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Silence

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Contempt1963

Both films ask whether meaning can bridge the space between two people; both suggest it cannot, but Godard laughs where Bergman weeps.

Godard's film-about-filmmaking: a marriage collapsing while a movie falls apart around them. Colour, music, energy, but the core is The Silence's theme—incomprehension between people who should know each other. A wildcard because it arrives from the left: playful, angry, devastatingly aware of its own artifice.

But It is deliberately incoherent and style-first. The marriage is secondary to Godard's formal game. Some will feel cheated.

Contempt poster
More like this (7)

Winter Light1963

Bergman again, same year. A pastor, a woman, a moment of spiritual and emotional drought. Shorter and colder than The Silence, shot in black-and-white austerity. Theology as frozen heartbreak.

But It is genuinely hard to love. Bergman made it deliberately difficult, and it shows.

Winter Light poster

L'Avventura1960

Antonioni's landmark: a woman vanishes and three people wander an Italian coast, unable to connect. The slow cinema that defined an era. Isolation not as interior anguish but as social refusal.

But Seventy minutes in and nothing is resolved. The ending will feel like a shrug. That's the point, but it stings.

L'Avventura poster

Tokyo Story1953

Ozu's tender mirror to The Silence's harshness: family members unable to articulate what they feel, time passing, connection failing despite tenderness. A masterpiece about the unsayable, rendered almost comedic.

But No plot to speak of. If narrative momentum matters to you, this will feel like torture.

Tokyo Story poster

Last Year at Marienbad1961

Robbe-Grillet and Resnais: a man and woman in a hotel, memory and reality fracturing. The Silence's spiritual twin in a different country. Dread as architectural, not intimate.

But It is actively hostile to comprehension. You are supposed to be confused, and some find that gimmicky.

Last Year at Marienbad poster

Red Desert1964

Antonioni's woman in a failing marriage, shot in sickly colour amid industrial desolation. The Silence's depression rendered visible in landscape. Communication as impossible as meaning.

But It is structurally a soap opera content stripped of soap opera feeling. Some find it empty rather than profound.

Red Desert poster

Mulholland Drive2001

Both films treat incomprehension between intimate people not as a plot problem but as their central subject. Both suggest you cannot know someone you live with.

Lynch's Hollywood descent: two women, doubled identities, Los Angeles as a blank stage where desire and reality splinter. Shot in colour and at feature length, but it carries The Silence's sense that conversation is a door that locks from both sides. Utterly of its era, yet timeless in its alienation.

But Structural confusion is intentional and unresolved. If you need to understand a film's architecture before you can feel it, this will frustrate you.

Mulholland Drive poster

Happy as Lazzaro2018

Both films treat silence as the honest response to a world that does not cohere. Both trust the viewer to find meaning in what is withheld.

Rohrwacher's strange miracle: a film about feudal remnants in rural Italy shot with fable-like distance and Bergman's moral seriousness. Dialogue sparse, spiritual dread everywhere. Visually and tonally from nowhere you'd expect, yet it shares The Silence's faith in silence itself as a language.

But It shifts register abruptly midway. Some experience this as genius; others as betrayal. Plot is secondary; atmosphere is everything.

Happy as Lazzaro poster

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The Passion of Anna, Night Games, The Lady from the Sea, Torment