Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
There has been a long fascination with the idea of the end of the world. I’m not specifically talking about the eschatology of Christianity in this case, but more in the literal “the world is going to end” sense, whether through nuclear devastation, climate peril, or disease. There’s a part of us that seems to yearn for the species-wide abyss. Probably my first two encounters with this idea were stories—Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 and Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World. Roshwald’s book is about a man living in the deepest bunker after a nuclear war while Bradbury’s story is more about the world simply switching off. I bring these up because both stories are far more interesting than Silent Night, and that shouldn’t be the case.
This is an “end of the world” story, and unlike the bombastic 2012, the action-oriented Snowpiercer, or the darkly comic Don’t Look Up, this is a film much closer to The Happening, in a sense. Essentially, humanity has dry-humped the planet so badly that the planet is fighting back. A massive noxious poison cloud has begun engulfing the world, and what everyone is getting for Christmas this year is death.
This isn’t going to be obvious right away. Nell (Keira Knightley) and Simon (Matthew Goode) are hosting their yearly Christmas party with their friends from college. This is taking place at a massive country estate; it’s not obvious in the beginning, but my guess is to get us to realize that what is happening is happening to everyone, not just the poor and middle class. Anyway, Nell and Simon’s friends start arriving, all of them extremely posh and glittery, and while this is clearly a party, there are also signs of it being off somehow. The kids have been given special permission to swear, and when it’s discovered that Nell has forgotten the sticky toffee pudding, Tony (Rufus Jones), the husband of Nell’s sister Sandra (Annabelle Wallis), robs a grocery store to get some.
Over the course of the film, it is revealed that the poison clouds have been circling the world, essentially killing everything in their wake. The British government has issued suicide pills for the populace, excepting undocumented people and the homeless, to allow them to die peacefully rather than horrifically from the poison gas cloud. The movie, then, is about the hours leading up to the estate being engulfed by the poison cloud.
Those hours are going to involve a lot of petty jealousies being revealed and a lot of rebellion in the person of Art (Roman Griffin Davis), the son of Nell and Simon. Among the petty nonsense brought up on literally the last night of everyone’s life is the fact that Sandra was in love with family friend James (Sope Dirisu) and is distressed that they never had sex—something that several people at the party encourage them to do despite Sandra’s marriage to Tony and James’s marriage to Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp). We also learn that Sophie is pregnant, and despite the poison cloud being pretty much 100% effective at killing everything, she is having second thoughts about using the suicide pill since this will also kill her, well, zygote at this point in the pregnancy. It’s also worth adding here that pretty much everyone hates Kitty (Davida McKenzie), Sandara and Tony’s daughter.
And this is the Big Chill-esque layer of nonsense that we’re going to dive into. Everyone is catty that James is evidently a lot older than Sophie. Everyone is aghast that in the past, Bella (Lucy Punch) had sex with Tony, something that shocks everyone since Bella is now in a lesbian relationship with Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste). When Art decides that he won’t take the pill and will instead help Sophie, his parents freak out and he runs out into the night...while everyone else sings and dances, oblivious to a child running around outside around poison clouds.
The reality about Silent Night is that the idea is a very good one and an interesting one, and we’re given these selfish assholes as the people we’re supposed to connect with. Of all of these characters, only Art and his two younger twin brothers (played by Roman Griffin Davis’s actual younger twin brothers Hardy and Gilby) are at all sympathetic. Okay, maybe Sophie who is more a victim of the drama and perhaps Alex, who gets very drunk relatively quickly and thus isn’t a part of the worst of it. Seriously, though, these people are terrible.
There’s also a significant issue of visibility in places. When Art runs out into the night, it’s really difficult to see what is happening. I don’t get the reason for making it so dark.
I really wanted to like Silent Night. I think I’m supposed to feel some kind of regret or sadness at the passing of these people, and mostly, as sad as this is to say, I just felt relief. If the world is going to end, it would almost be worth going out painfully just to watch these smug, rich shit stains die first.
Why to watch Silent Night: Cool idea.
Why not to watch: Most of these characters are complete asses.