The Silence - Mini-series Review

From the beginnings of a badly advertised show, The Silence turned out to be a brilliantly crafted crime/family drama that showed a witness of a murder escalade into two families threatened by corrupt officers of the law. From my perspective, the show wasn’t worth batting an eyelid to this time last week but after the first episode I was hooked--okay, yes it’s true some of the more complicated aspects of the mini-series were badly done and some of the acting was a little off the norm but that can be passed for the ingenuity of the script and the originality of the idea.

Delving deeper into the drama, it can be revealed that the cast were badly introduced for me as I watched loyally from the beginning and it took until episode three to realise that Amelia had three cousins, not two, and that it was her father who was brother to Jim, but this could be due to the need to move the plot forward, introduce modern concepts including the atypical ‘teens on drugs’ saga, ‘everyone goes to raves’ and of course ‘blowjobs in the public toilets’ which am sure are common at pubs across the United Kingdom, Bristol included.

Moving aside from those rather random fun facts, the drama included within the show was brilliant, with breathtaking highs and fist clenching lows, although the conclusion in the final episode was rather open-ended, Jim and Amelia’s--the protagonists of the show--fate uncertain, with Mac and his fellow antagonist presumably going to go down for their murdering ways, but everything was left totally undetermined. Was there a reason for this? We’ll never know; maybe the BBC wanted the viewers to come up with their own conclusions, maybe they want to run it for another series, or they couldn’t commission another totally concluding episode and liked the four episodes as they were so ran them anyway. All is unknown…

Which brings me into the fact that the entire show seemed to be working towards that concluding episode, to find out what would happen to Jim and Amelia’s family, how it would effect their lives, how everyone involved would be forced to grow up in some way to only have, as I said, the conclusion end rather openly. Although I was much appreciated that the middle two episodes were full of perfect drama and acting, including Tom’s relationship with his drugged up friends, Jim’s uncertainty at work and Amelia’s successful attempt at running from it all.

But talking about the actors involved, the emotion put to place through those episodes, Genevieve Barr who played Amelia really had the whole thing on her shoulders, Douglas Henshall was amazing, really making a good use of such a loose character like Jim, but for Genevieve to take on the whole drama, to allow the viewers to follow both her and her character’s journey from simple deaf girl learning to hear to witness of a murder mortally threatened was just amazing. A complete gem of an actress to which I hope to see her in more things in the coming future!

To wrap up this short but sweet review of a small sequence of episodes, all I can say is that the series, although badly advertised--seriously, I only saw one teaser for it on the Saturday before airing!--the mini-series was a good enjoyment, with intense drama, a rollercoaster of emotion and even bringing an understanding to the deaf world, something we all get in touch with at some point in our lives, but still the entire thing would have worked just as well as a full-length series or even a BBC movie, which would be an interesting concept in itself. Still, as said before, here’s to seeing Genevieve Barr in more programmes!