Breathtaking masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (25 March 2017)

"Silence" is just what the title says. It is a silence nerve racking. Even in the most powerful of scenes, the ones where you'd expect some intensity, there is still silence. There are scenes where you want to scream and you can't. You 're getting lost in the atmosphere, the incapability of taking action and you don't scream because you feel you can't or you shouldn't.
I find this brilliant. The movie makes you fell exactly like the characters most of the time. You can't fully understand the meaning until the end. And maybe not even after that. But I believe the meaning is on some level subjective. I still have mixed thoughts and feelings about it. I can't decide if it is liberating, hopeful or pessimistic. Maybe it's all three somehow.
But I understood this. You can't expect some sign of truth from God, if you believe in one. It is you, it is us, humans, alone in this world and our faith is all we' re gonna have. The movie shows the Japanese believing in Christianity, wanting to go to "Paraiso" (paradise), but it leaves doubts about whether they truly understood what they believed in. Did they truly believe in Jesus Christ and God, did they really understand the meaning of Christianity or did they die just to go to paradise, to escape from suffering, or worse, did they die just because the interpreter wanted to make the priest deny his faith? That is what makes the protagonist eventually do what he did. He fought with God's silence over and over again. He fought, he doubted, until he understood that he had to embrace it. Truth or not, he knew what was the right thing to do. Accept God's silence and try to speak for him. Eventually hear Him speak through His silence. Feeling his presence beside him. Feeling he's not alone. Never letting go of his faith. Never letting go of himself. In the end, he didn't care if he was praying to silence. In the end, silence was liberating for him. It was all he ever knew. In the end, it was not silence. It was the answer.