Silent Night, muted massacre (review)

Beneath its appearance as a post-John Wick Z series released directly on Amazon lies John Woo’s best film since Windtalkers.

The silence before the fatal detonation is perhaps what belongs most to the cinema of John Woo -which we parody more willingly, and more easily, with doves and slow-motion shootings. The silence before John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, leaning against a mirror, turn around to shoot each other in About-facethe silence between the two knocks on the door by Chow Yun-fat in The KillerCage soldier suffering from deafness in Windtalkers (his last great film), this moment of weightlessness to the sound ofOver the rainbow (About-faceagain) before the explosion… “This calm and this emptiness, set in rhythm with their best enemies, liveliness and overflow, bear the signature of John Woo”wrote Antoine de Baecque at the release of About-face In The Cinema Notebooks.

That was in 1997. Now it’s 2023, and Woo has all but disappeared from the cinema radar, as if exhausted by his ambitious ancient fresco The Three Kingdoms in 2008: he has only made three films since, and the last one released in France, Manhunt, was not very famous. His third to date, Silent Night bears the mark of calm and emptiness, and of liveliness and excess: its somewhat lame pitch (a person who has become mute because of a fired bullet becomes vigilant, and the film unfolds without any diegetic dialogue) allows him to literally deploy this opposition between the two opposing forces of silence and noise, order and chaos. Silent Night is a vigilant movie hyper violent, where anonymous Latino gangers are massacred in LA without much remorse, but it is above all – and this is pure Woo – a film in which a love story dies before our eyes time for an absolutely heartbreaking sequence. Without a word, without a sound, just before the explosion…

Silent Nightby John Woo, with Joel Kinnaman, Catalina Sandino Mureno, Kid Cudi… Available on Amazon Prime Video

John Woo remembers Jean-Claude Van Damme: “He was a big kid”