Rental Review: The Bay Of Silence

Architect Will (Claes Bang) and artist Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko) certainly seem happy enough – getting engaged in Italy after a whirlwind romance and deciding to move to London together.

Ros already has twins, but further good news comes in the shape of another pregnancy. A heavy fall sees son Amadeo born prematurely, also sending Ros into a spiral of post-natal depression, culminating in the mother grabbing her three kids and going on the run while hubby is on a business trip.

Will, unsurprisingly, is panic-stricken, trekking across Europe in a search for his missing family. But he quickly comes to realise that there is a lot more to this story than first thought – and his wife has a past that he was totally unaware of…

Based on a Lisa St Aubin de Teran novel, The Bay of Silence has plenty going for it, from a strong cast to great locations to, stripped down to its essence, an involving central mystery.

But there’s just too much going on for a 90-minute movie (the result of boiling down a novel I suspect), with characters and sub-plots thrown in every few minutes.

We get red herrings, characters acting suspiciously for no real reason, ominous music telling you how you should be reacting and some very, very questionable decision-making on behalf of some of the central characters.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed it – Bang as the husband and father trying to get to the bottom of the mystery holds things together pretty well, while Kurylenko never strays into the histrionics the role could have prompted.

The rest of the cast fare less well, from Brian Cox as Ros’ father to the under-used Alice Krige as Ros’ mother, with characters thrown in here and there for a couple of minutes to move the plot along.

The film looks great, with director Paula van der Oest juxtaposing scenes at idyllic beaches and windswept, gothic clifftop cottages to good effect.

But The Bay Of Silence remains a movie that constantly threatens to get intriguing, threatens to get involving and threatens to get thrilling – but never quite manages it.