Shot in Mexico’s Amish-like Mennonite community, Silent Light opens with the year’s most beautiful shot, showing dawn. A festival favourite, it took the Jury Prize at Cannes, but fatally lacks substance.
The story concerns Johan, a farmer who’s having an affair despite his religious beliefs and is tortured by it. The wordless longueurs and lingering landscapes are meant to reflect his guilt but they merely bore, and since the importance of religion to the community is poorly established, his dilemma is never clear - the women are reduced to mere ciphers for his feelings.
A last-act twist into religo-realist territory confirms this as an oddity rather than a magnum opus.