2024-08-31 15:39:28
A young waitress, Frida, looks at photos of billionaire Slater King with an almost delusional fascination. She will be serving with a colleague at his fancy Los Angeles party. Still, it seems the girl must be obsessed with the charming rich man for another reason. Only much later, the film called The Silent Sign reveals that even the heroine herself does not know what the connection is.
The directorial debut of actress Zoë Kravitz, which is being screened in Czech cinemas, begins like a fairy tale or a horror film. The genres are sometimes quite similar.
When Frida and her friend change from their work clothes into brightly colored dresses to infiltrate businessman Slater King’s party in a completely different role than as a service person, it looks silly. Like Frida, a black woman from a poor background, trying to pretend she can walk in heels.
However, this clumsy Cinderella falls almost straight into the arms of a wealthy man who does not hide that he is interested in Frida. And not only as a momentary pleasure at a party full of luxury, pretending and playing socially required roles.
King invites the two girls to his island, which he says represents a specific form of paradise. No phones, no distractions from the outside world, but a regular supply of archive wine and a wide range of mainly psychedelic drugs – including the locally popular mixture of MDMA and psilocybin, i.e. ecstasy mushrooms.
Meanwhile, on the island, a native old woman shouts an ominous word in heavily accented English, the other employees taking care of this “resort” just walk around in silence and occasionally dispose of overgrown, slightly poisonous snakes. So what could go wrong with a never-ending pool party – with champagne and “really thick joints”?
Naomi Ackie plays the waitress Frida, who is invited by a rich man to his luxurious island. | Photo: Carlos Somonte
Silent Sign was filmed and partly written by Zoë Kravitz, a thirty-five-year-old American actress known for the films Batman or Kimi. It follows a trend that shows the world of the rich with a scathing satirical look and with the appropriate flavor of blood, murders and other genre properties.
In addition to these motifs known from the series White Lotus, the culinary horror Menu or the harsh satire Saltburn – i.e. the various frictions between the rich and the poor or the reflection of the evils associated with living in constant luxury – however, it also opens up the painful topic of memory and forgetting or displacement, which victims of sexual violence deal with with experienced shock.
To this can be added a pinch of ethnic tension, which can be remotely reminiscent of, for example, Jordan Peele’s satirical horror films such as Escape. A fairly ambitious set of motifs for a debut.
From the beginning, Zoë Kravitz tries to show directorial confidence and self-confidence. It attacks the audience with impressive details, surprises with the work with sound, everything is amplified when the protagonists fall into an endless drug rush on the island. Understandably, however, a silent sign soon reveals the depraved and depraved truth of this false psychedelic utopia.
With the help of endless intoxication with various substances, the film masks for a long time that it does not have very well-written characters. We don’t know much about them, it’s just clear what roles they represent here, and therefore we also have an idea where the story will go.
The film reveals the depraved truth of a false psychedelic utopia. Pictured are Naomi Ackie as Frida and Adria Arjona as Sarah. | Photo: Carlos Somonte
Rather than a well-thought-out satire, the novel is a relatively predictable thriller in a fancy, stylized guise. On the way to the goal, he wields potentially serious ideas about the oppression of the patriarchy and the monstrous complacency of the rich, but in the end, the formal and genre games come out quite empty.
Actor Channing Tatum is not very convincing as Slater King, and Naomi Ackie in the lead role makes the audience worried about what might happen to her with her expressive eyes, but that is still relatively little for an original thriller.
It’s often not clear if the biggest genre clichés are meant to be used on purpose, and the creators wink at the audience in a “we know you know” spirit. Even if it did, it wouldn’t alleviate their schematicity too much. For example, natives shouting nonsensical sentences with a dark expression already belong more to the rank of horror parodies.
Zoë Kravitz has a few ideas, there are fun scenes, and one can imagine that the brutal finale will satisfy many – not necessarily just with its gore, but as a loud and quite funny retribution to the representatives of a system that has long played against not only women, but also many minorities .
Even so, the picture is rather disturbing: in addition to many internal problems, for one more reason. It represents a growing trend of would-be free-spirited filmmakers who aren’t afraid of gory or otherwise disturbing scenes justified by showing some form of social reflection using genre devices.
Whether it’s this year’s Cannes hit Substance, which will soon go into mainstream distribution after its premiere at the Karlovy Vary festival, or the recent thriller Damn Bloody Love, all these works combine a distinctive style and an effort to amaze the audience with something that takes them out of their comfort zone. But often these are just empty streams of blood, guts and other forbidden corners of the human anatomy – technically, perhaps, inventive as in the case of Substance, yet scenes that quickly pass away.
Certainly there are creators who can work with extreme themes in a sophisticated way, for example David Cronenberg. However, the current wave of stylish bloodbaths sometimes seems as if the authors have found a cheap ticket to festival competitions or to the favor of critics.
Film
Silent sign
Directed by: Zoë Kravitz
Vertical Entertainment, Czech premiere on August 22.