MOVIE · 1963

The Silence

DramaRomance96 min

Traveling through an unnamed European country edging toward war, two sisters and a young boy stop in a nearly empty hotel where their inability to communicate only sharpens the strain between them. Ingrid Thulin is Ester, a sickly intellectual; Gunnel Lindblom’s Anna drifts toward a brief affair with a local man while her son Johan roams the corridors and streets on his own, collecting strange encounters. As the sisters circle each other in close quarters, the foreign language around them and the threat outside the hotel deepen the distance inside the family.