Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Click here for our continuing coverage of TIFF, and click here for our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
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It must be one hell of an experience to have your dramedy, written in the weeks before a catastrophe alters the very fabric of society itself, to be imbued with a new significance and meaning following said disaster. Viewers and critics will begin to see things that you, perhaps, did not expect, and twist your meanings about in awkward ways, interpreting it as a parable for our modern diseased times rather than the light-footed satire of status amongst UK yuppies that you were originally aiming for. It’s even more interesting when your views — perfectly acceptable pre-COVID — can now be read as an endorsement of the paranoia of the worst aspects of modern discourse, which feels like a gigantic headache, much like one attempting to turn back a tide with nothing more than a stick without the help of an angry God on your side: Either the water’s going to get you or the Egyptians will. This is the paradox that Camille Griffin’s Silent Night currently finds itself in, an “impending doom” apocalyptic dramedy about a final Christmas gathering among longtime friends as some sort of Airborne Toxic Event makes its way towards their manor house to make a muck of their after-dinner festivities.
Delillo allusions aside, this set-up would ideally provide fertile ground for comedy, much like it was in It’s a Disaster! a few years back. You’ve got bratty kids (Roman Griffith Davis from Jojo Rabbit is basically our idealistic protagonist here, who loves to swear and yell about Greta Thunberg; and Davida McKenzie as the kind of bizarre daughter from hell, wearing matching dresses with her dolls), and an assortment of couples with all sorts of different arrangements and sexual politics. You have the posh “owners” of the manor house they’re spending their final hours at (Keira Knightly and Matthew Goode), attempting to hold everything together for the sake of the kids while they get their final kicks, you’ve got a lesbian couple (Lucy Punch and Kirby Howell-Baptiste) from very different backgrounds, and are working through their own issues. There’s an age-stratified pairing between a doctor (Sope Dirisu) and his much younger partner (Lily-Rose Depp), the latter of whom is considering not taking the government-provided suicide pill to avoid the worst of the suffering the toxic cloud will bring; and, finally, the Borings (Annabelle Wallis and Rufus Jones), a pretend and posh couple whose marriage feels as fake and strained as their demeanor. And, sure, there are a few solid jokes in Silent Night, one of which, about John Hillcoat’s The Road, actually got me to laugh out loud in my own home.
However, Griffin’s not too sure whether or not she really wants Silent Night to be a comedy or not, and she winds up settling for an unsatisfying blend of mediocre humor and even more contrived drama. One can draw a straight line from her influences — Melancholia, On the Beach, other ensemble films where death is unavoidable and ennui runs high — to her work here, and the deep wellsprings of meaning that those other films drink from are replaced by light and flavorless skim milk. By the time the Knightly/Goode family have a Zoom call with soon-to-be-dearly-departed grandma as the poison cloud literally bangs its way down her door, it’s hard not to imagine most viewers rolling their eyes — they’re not funny enough to be decent sources of humor, and they’re not deep enough for their suffering to be properly meaningful — which is a shame, because her talented cast tries their damnedest to bring this film to life at, no matter how the material that they’re given is at any given point. Griffin’s flat visuals don’t often help: It’s a hard thing to be afraid of a toxic cloud, especially when we can’t see what it does to the people who are hit by it, and the film just sort of looks like something you’d see on a Beeb channel numbered in the teens at five in the morning after a long night out at the pub.
Perhaps this is why both TIFF and the director in her introduction stressed the relevance of the film to our current moment: That’s the only reading of Silent Night that could be twisted into something relevant or heterodox, one that might endow it with an interesting meaning ex post facto. You might have guessed, as from the scant details I’ve provided above, what the UK government’s plan is here: kill all those that are eligible (illegal immigrants, however, will be fucked and forced to suffer through the worst of the illness) with government-provided suicide pills. Davis’ character spends a decent chunk of the film browsing the pages set up by the authorities documenting what happens to someone who gets the illness, and, of course, comes up with the bright idea not to take the pill when it’s given to him. You can probably guess what happens from here if you’ve ever seen a movie like this before, and it’s a plot point that might have been totally innocuous in 2019, back when one could say “fuck the government” without having to consider what exactly all of that means and who it applies to, but in 2021… well, let’s just say that it might not necessarily be the message that health officials in any country would want you to hear. But if we’re gonna poke that hornet’s nest, I vastly prefer DASHCAM‘s intentional boundary-pushing rather than Silent Night‘s stumble backward into controversy. At least that film knew what it was.