The Silent Hour (2024) Review: Brad Anderson’s Otherwise Intriguing Die Hard-Like Thriller with a Novelty Twist Doesn’t Reach its Full Potential

Brad Anderson’s latest movie The Silent Hour has two things that got me interested. One is from the novelty of Dan Hall’s debut screenplay, which centres on a Boston police detective Frank Shaw (Joel Kinnaman) ends with hearing loss after an accident in the line of duty trying to apprehend a suspect. He has since been forced to rely on hearing aids and his disability frequently hinders him from doing his police work as usual.

Then, one day his partner Doug Slater (Mark Strong) needs his help to become an interpreter to get a statement from a deaf young woman named Ava (deaf actress Sandra Mae Frank), who has witnessed a murder. She requires police protection and everything goes well at first. But after Frank realises he accidentally left his phone in Ava’s place, he is forced to drive back to her apartment. Things go wrong when the gang leader (Mekhi Phifer) brings his men shows up at Ava’s apartment and threatens her since she has video evidence recorded on her phone.

Now, this leads to an intriguing question: How would a deaf cop like Frank Shaw is going to deal with the armed gang? Being hearing impaired becomes disadvantageous for him in a life-or-death situation like this and more so, he has no phone with him to call for backup and if that’s not enough, his hearing aids run out of battery. He is still rusty when comes to ASL as he tries to get used to communicating with Ava.

The second thing? That would be seeing Brad Anderson returning to the familiar territory takes place mostly in the confines of a single location. He already did it in Session 9 (abandoned mental hospital) and Transsiberian (the titular train connecting Moscow and China), both of which were among his best works. The idea of Kinnaman’s Frank Shaw trapped inside the building with the gang leader’s men already blocking every possible exit instantly gives me the vibes of a Die Hard-like setting.

Except for The Silent Hour doesn’t feature Frank in a John McClane mode and has none of the spectacular action set pieces. Instead, the movie is mostly a typical cop shooting bad guys kind of gunfight, which is fine by me as long as Anderson manages to keep the tension taut and suspenseful enough. And for a while there, it looks as if he succeeds in delivering a tense single-location action thriller.

It also helps that Joel Kinnaman, who already had experience playing a role with a disability after last year’s John Woo-directed Silent Night, where his protagonist has the vocal cords severely damaged and rendered him mute. Here, as a hearing-impaired cop, Kinnaman does a good job in his role, conveying his frustration through facial expression and the use of silence and muffled sound effects. He is also backed by the equally solid Sandra Mae Frank, and they share good chemistry as two deaf people trying to help each other overcome the ordeal.

And yet, The Silent Hour falls short in many other areas. The action grows repetitive (the same old run, hide and shoot just doesn’t cut it to sustain the momentum) as the movie progresses. I was expecting Anderson could have turned the confines of a building into a visual playground while bringing in a sense of claustrophobia. Too bad that’s barely the case in this movie as he opted to stick to the routines by going around the circle. Save for Kinnaman and Frank, the movie is sadly wasted the rest of the cast including Mekhi Phifer who is hardly giving much of a lasting impression as the gang leader while Mark Strong is relegated to a mostly thankless role. By the time the movie reaches its limp third act that’s already losing its steam earlier, The Silent Hour ends up as a missed opportunity that could have been better.