The silence of the calves – Kommersant

At the box office – The Misanthrope by Damian Sifron, the Hollywood debut of the famous Argentine director. Thriller about the search for a mass murderer appeared Mikhail Trofimenkov in a good old-fashioned, but non-hysterical slowness, the actions of his dignity are exhausted.

Filmed from above, New Year’s Baltimore, overshadowed by grandiose fireworks – the film begins with such a panorama – is a miracle how good it is. True, the big American cities, with the exception of Los Angeles, are so photogenic in themselves that it is almost impossible to photograph them badly. But just as well he shoots Sifron and the outskirts of Baltimore, subtly close to the Russian heart, snow-covered forests on the sides of broken highways.

Even more beautiful is the festive city, when the shots of an insane sniper merge with the roar of fireworks, in a matter of minutes they sent 29 inhabitants, chosen at random, to another world. The Baltimore region is just as beautiful when a police detachment runs into an impromptu minefield: another 17 “two hundredths”. Sifron, with Latin generosity, does not skimp on corpses. But, despite their abundance, the film does not break into fashionable stroboscopic hysteria. The psychopath is doing his job. The police and the FBI, represented by the imposing gray-haired gay Lamarck (Ben Mendelsohn), weighed down by heart disease, excessive adherence to principles in relations with politicians-“scavengers” and indistinct official “jambs”, – their own.

The formal traditionalism of the film is lulling, but only at first. Sooner rather than later, questions arise about the script, which consists of genre clichés and poorly mended logical failures.

Okay, the detective novels and movies of the last two decades have taught us that the best police and FBI personnel are hard psychopaths. So the lone wolf Lamarck unmistakably chooses Eleanor (Shailene Woodley), a simple guard without a higher education, who happened to be in the right place at the right time at the right time, as her trusted partner. She has an anamnesis – you won’t wish it on your enemy. Severe drug addiction plus suicidal tendencies. Insights about where the elusive shooter managed to leave her legacy come to her just at the moment when she, having collapsed into the bath after a hard day, is considering whether to open her veins once again. Is it any wonder that in the finale she – with one click of her fingers – will receive the position of an FBI special agent.

There is a great desire to write that Shailene Woodley cosplays Clarissa Starling from The Silence of the Lambs. But the joke of the script is that Clarissa’s avatar turns out to be more of a mass murderer. As Eleanor astutely notes, having thus instantly gained Lamarck’s trust, he “crushes people like mosquitoes” solely because he craves love and comfort. The film should be called “Moo of the Calves.” After all, as it turns out, the shooter once worked at a slaughterhouse, where he was imbued with the unfortunate fate of future hamburgers.

As a result of this nervous shock, he put his partner in an industrial meat grinder, turning him into “coarsely minced meat”, and became a vegan vegan. Well, from here to shooting at revelers or visitors to the mall is one step away.

Are we supposed to take pity on him? Judging by how pathetically the murderer will end his life, Sifron believes that yes, they should. In fact, there is no pity in this film for anyone. Well, except perhaps a company of stupid ultra-rightists, who drunkenly wished to become television stars and even fell under the distribution, crossfire of equally insane guardians of the law.