Movie Review: Silenced (2011)

Grade: B

Silenced is difficult to watch, and it should be.

Based on a novel that was inspired by real events at a Korean boarding school for deaf children, Silenced follows a well-meaning teacher who joins the school’s staff only to discover that his employers have a long history of brutal abuse against their charges.

The movie’s running time is neatly split split in two. As creepily atmospheric as any horror film, the first half is set in a world of unsettling shadows tinged with the unnatural. From the uncanny likeness between the principal and his twin brother to the otherworldly glow of the jellyfish in his office aquarium, nothing at the school seems quite right from the very beginning. Silenced’s second half morphs into a brightly lit (but no less troubling) courtroom thriller charting the legal struggles to end the cruelty at Ja-ae Academy.

Silenced’s greatest strength is the performances of its young stars, all of whom do powerful, heartbreaking work. And yes, drama goofball Gong Yoo is also good—if a bit more blank than strictly necessary—in his dramatic role as Kang In Ho, the new schoolteacher.

Kang In Ho doesn’t have a lot going for him. He’s a recently widowed artist who has never been able to make a living from his drawings, and he has left his sickly daughter in his mother’s care to accept the position at Ja-ae. Making matters worse, his family is left all but destitute when one of the school’s administrators demands that In Ho make a huge contribution to the school’s “development fund” as a condition of his employment.

When he realizes what’s happening at the academy, In Ho bands together with an area social worker (a cute but underutilized Jang Yoo Mi) to raise the alarm that something’s wrong. They’re met with indifferent silence from every official they contact. It’s only the publicity garnered by the students’ taped testimony that makes the establishment take notice—and even then, they’re only willing to do what it takes to protect their jobs, not what it takes to bring justice.

Silenced spent several weeks on top of the Korean box office and even spawned a legal reforms. It also attracted a fair amount of attention in America, having a limited theatrical release and being reviewed in several mainstream publications before finding its way to both Netflix and Hulu.

One of the common criticisms Western reviewers have of Silenced is that it dilutes the children’s story by spending so much time with Kang In Ho. But I think these reviewers missed one of the issues at the heart of the film: This is not a Precious-style story of the abuses suffered by one individual. It’s the story of a whole constellation of wrongs that allowed the long-term, institutional abuse of some of society’s most vulnerable members. It’s about cronyism and corruption and the failure of the Korean court system to protect a whole class of forgotten children.

And the kids weren’t the only ones who were silenced by the status quo at Ja-ae Academy. The movie introduces us to some of the school’s cruelest teachers, but it also hints that other employees might have known what was happening and chosen to do nothing about it. After all, the school’s administration worked hard to guarantee they kept silent. Through In Ho’s mom, we hear about the principal’s great connections and how the strength of his recommendation got former employees coveted jobs in Seoul schools. There’s also evidence that the perpetrators intentionally sought out the destitute and unemployable to work at the academy, ensuring both their loyalty and dependence. Even the payment In Ho was forced to make to the school development fund was a tool used to this end; it put new hires at a financial disadvantage and made them all the more reliant on the Jae-ae for their income. All these things ensured that any potential rescuers would face the same ugly truth that In Ho’s mom hurls at him in the middle of a fight: “If you want to take care of yourself and your family, you can’t always just do right and speak up.”

In Ho’s storyline is essential to the movie, because it shows him doing what other people had done before him—choosing between remaining silent for the sake of his own well being or speaking out to protect children to whom he had no real ties. One of the movie’s most visceral scenes finds In Ho making up his mind about what road to take. He stands at the principal’s office door, holding a potted orchid his mother wanted him to pass along. Another teacher walks out of the office with a golf club in one hand and the collar of a weeping, bloody boy in another. In Ho is frozen for a moment, weighed down by both the orchid and the knowledge that stepping forward would mean losing his place at the school and being unable to take responsibility for his family. In Ho’s silence would have been the movie’s most dangerous, but not its most surprising.

I do agree with one complaint that comes up in most Western reviews of Silenced: its depiction of sexual violence is unnecessarily detailed and takes up far too much screen time. There’s value in an unflinching examination of the kind of brutality at play here, but to an American eye, the many scenes of gleeful adults molesting children crosses the line between shocking and prurient.

The movie’s roots as a novel are evident in some improbable tidiness, but sometimes this is used to good effect. Its first scene shows In Ho’s journey to Ja-ae Academy, intercutting shots of him driving through a tunnel with scenes of a young boy stumbling along train tracks toward another tunnel. When In Ho hits something in the road, there’s a moment of uncertainty about just what it was—an animal, or the boy? With this scene, the movie draws a line between In Ho and the school’s abusers; his actions killed an innocent, just like theirs did. It’s a reminder that, as an adult and a teacher, the safety of his students in his in hands in a very practical, physical way.

Silenced is both an enthralling and an important movie, if not a perfect one. It can even be read as an indictment of the Civil Law criminal system (which was ably explained on Ask a Korean a few years ago). Unlike the Common Law system used in America and elsewhere, there is no government recourse in civil law—once the movie’s abusers were able to buy off the parents of the students involved, the case could have disappeared forever from the courts, leaving the school’s administration able to continue the cycle of harming children and paying adults to look the other way. This fate was only avoided by a stroke of luck, but the fact that it could have happened at all is deeply upsetting.

Parts of this movie will make your skin crawl, and other parts will make you want to throw something very hard. But when it’s finally over you can go read articles at The Diplomat and The Guardian about the good it might just have done in the world, and realize that maybe it was all worth it in the end.