El Silencio

(aka Muted, showrunner Aitor Gabilondo, 6 episode mini-series, Netflix, 2023)

I cannot tell a lie: I was drawn to this Spanish series for Netflix because of a review in The Guardian, the headline of which promised an experience “so bad you’ll want to howl at your TV screen” (or, presumably, your computer screen). But let me be clear: I watched it not to have a smug, superior laugh. Nor, necessarily, to ‘save’ what is referred to as a “barely watchable” series (although I’ve now watched it twice).

Rather, I was keen to discover exactly what, in 2023, a culture-vane like The Guardian considers “badness” in TV or film to be. The review by Jack Seale hits off this way.

Normally a bad drama has a plot with holes in it. Spanish psychological thriller Muted is more like a black hole sucking in the occasional drifting nugget of narrative, destroying each one without trace. Rarely has such a serious-minded miniseries made so little sense.

‘Drifting nuggets of narrative’: that sounds quite enticing to me, personally. However, El Silencio is not an experimental narrative in the vein of Jacques Rivette, Raúl Ruiz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder or the El Pampero team of Argentina. The Guardian scribe sets no generic context for it other than “psychological thriller”. In fact, the true patrimony of El Silencio is quite clear to any cinephile who’s ever been absorbed in the popular and sub-popular thriller traditions of 1980s and ‘90s film.

Psychological thriller, erotic thriller, surveillance thriller, investigative/procedural thriller, with a touch of ‘70s conspiracy thriller (which Seale does note), and the necessary updates to include the 21st century technology of texting and viral video: El Silencio is thus in the ballpark of certain works by Brian De Palma, Tony Scott (Deja Vu, 2006), Phillip Noyce (Sliver, 1993), Lawrence L. Simeone (Eyes of the Beholder, 1992) … it’s a long list.

Tricky, busy films, distributed among several or many characterological points-of-view, and often built on what could be taken conventionally as a ‘risible’ premise with ‘silly’ developments. In other words, full of unfolding twists and revelations – the kind of thing that some genre fans love to call ‘crazy’ and ‘outrageous’. I prefer to take such popular art forms as a baseline definition of what fiction is, what it can do – and to assume that as the aesthetic norm, rather than naturalist/realist, daintily believable/plausible, so-called ‘three-dimensional’ drama.

Here's the premise of El Silencio. Sergio (Arón Piper, maintaining a dark, unsmiling intensity throughout), convicted murderer of both his parents (hurling them off the balcony of their elevated apartment), is released, six years later, from a carceral institution … for the sake of an intriguing psychological experiment. He will be monitored at all times – in the very same apartment (located in Bilbao) where the crime was committed – via hidden camera and microphones, and even an ankle bracelet that monitors his heart rate. The mastermind of this scheme is Ana (Almudena Amor in a rather wooden, one-note performance), a psychologist who trained under Sergio’s tyrannical and manipulative mother. For Sergio, it quickly transpires, has already been relentlessly ‘watched’ and made a guinea pig once before in his life, by cold-hearted Mamá.

In its opening episode, El Silencio maps out a Tony Scott-style terrain: the surveillance seems, at first, veritably panoptical, following him everywhere both inside and well beyond his home … until the system hits its inevitable limits. That’s when the blind spots, whispered words, obscured gestures and off-screen spaces start kicking in. A large network of characters is gradually introduced, including women who wrote Sergio adoring letters when he was in prison, the priest Natanael (a hammy turn from Ramiro Blas) who welcomes Sergio onto his farm for the Young and the Fallen, and a nasty cop, Cabrera (Aitor Luna), who opposes Ana’s plan from the first moment, apparently doing everything he can to undermine it.

Intrigue is spread out, across the series, by the indication of not only who is really working for whom, but what precise relations (family ties, in particular) obtain among all these players. It will all hinge, ultimately, on Sergio’s younger sister, Noa (Irene Virgüez) – who, in her younger incarnation (played by the Irene’s sister Avril), is introduced via a spooky vignette that combines Nicolas Winding Refn’s typical colour scheme with the star-spangled toy-dispositif that structured the plot of Leos Carax’s Annette (2021).

Yes, there are a lot of narrative ‘hooks’ that come and go, surge forth and vanish, across the six episodes. Seale is correct in pointing out that the detail enshrined in its title – the chosen ‘muteness’ of its troubled anti-hero – more or less disappears fast. But mystery-thrillers have long played with such bait-and-switch, multiplying and diversionary tactics, on the level of theme as much as plot. And the conspiracy/corruption angle amounts to nothing more than the clandestine chats between a couple of behind-the-scenes guys, one who gives orders and another who carries them out (with accomplices) … but that’s exactly how it was in Blow Out (1981), too.

‘Risible’ thrillers tend to mutate a lot as they proceed: that’s a huge part of their particular art, craft and pleasure. Seale: “Muted ends having failed completely to illuminate the criminal mind” – but psychological illumination of socio-psychopathy may not at all be what it’s after.

As I write this, the series has only gone public for a few weeks, so I’ll stay respectfully silent on most of the plot machinations. The series is well put together (Gabe Ibáñez and Esteban Crespo handle directorial duties alongside showrunner Aitor Gabilondo), especially on the production design level (a lot of good things are done with the across-the-street proximity of surveyors and surveyed). It’s imperfect, for sure: it could have trusted its images more and cut down on redundant, explanatory/exclamatory dialogue. The heavy pedal on characters announcing that they are about to speak in metaphor or parable is unwise.

However, suffice to say, what I found most captivating about El Silencio is its extremely perverse undercurrent (eventually not so under). A camera-spin around an embracing couple clinched the subterranean connection, for me, with De Palma’s great (and undervalued) Obsession (1976), which explores one of the greatest resources of the true ‘psychological thriller’: it’s never just a question of who killed and why, but who desires, and along which path of human relation. And when family ties are part of the relational equation – creating splits and mirror-correspondences between characters of different ages – everything gets more intense. Doubling: plenty of that going down, especially as, backward through Obsession, there’s the ghost of Vertigo (1958), and bodies falling off towers …

So what was The Guardian’s problem with all this?

Muted is implausible and illogical in both its wider story arcs and its details … characters conveniently appear by chance in just the right location, express surprise and alarm at the obvious consequences of their own actions, and display an awareness of facts they couldn’t possibly know.

Same old, same old: the type of facile critical response that was already pissing Hitchcock off 70 years ago. In truth, the least plausible moments of action in El Silencio are among its most exciting – short-cuts (or short-circuits) in time and space that shoot us into new clinches, like characters instantly appearing (or disappearing) elsewhere: a nod to a key scene in De Palma’s Passion (2012).

And what could have improved the situation for Seale? “What might be expected to make the whole mess watchable would be an air of febrile, soapy camp”.

Verisimilitude or camp: these are the poles that define our sad world of middlebrow screen aesthetics.

© Adrian Martin 3 June 2023