‘Silence 6-9’: Thessaloniki Review

Dir: Christos Passalis. Greece. 2022. 81mins

A beguiling strangeness hums, like a power line, beneath this sometimes absurdist, sometimes eerie and frequently poignant solo debut from actor-turned-director Christos Passalis. Although his story, co-written with Eleni Vergeti, maintains its oddness and withholds many of its secrets, it does so in a way that is largely magnetic rather than repellent. It should prove attractive to further festivals and, potentially, arthouse or cult distributors after playing in the International Competition in Passalis’ hometown festival of Thessaloniki, following a world premiere in Karlovy Vary.

The humour and humanism make this more Samuel Beckett than Franz Kafka

Passalis also plays Aris, who arrives late at night in a town that could almost be post-Apocalyptic were it not for the sound of birds and insects, and the distant bark of dogs. “I’m lost,” he tells a woman who appears almost out of the blue.

In fact, he’s simultaneously “lost” and where he’s meant to be, having arrived in this odd seaside town for a job. But that sense of being nowhere and somewhere all at once is a constant in a slippery tale that prizes mystery above all things. The woman, Anna (Angeliki Papoulia), offers to show him to the town’s hotel, staffed, it seems, by two chambermaids who carry the distinct whiff of ulterior motive.

Aris is in town to maintain the strange antennas that surround the area, and which carry a constant murmur of messages from townsfolk who have suddenly disappeared. In the three-hour silence of the title, relatives can record the whisperings of the wires onto old-school cassettes. While some of the residents cling to these scraps from beyond, the town’s would-be new mayor is running on a “We will forget” ticket. 

The humour and humanism make this more Samuel Beckett than Franz Kafka. There is a Waiting for Godot feel as Aris, attempting to report to his antenna manager, is told to go places where the manager never appears, or to “come back tomorrow’. While he marks time, he begins to forge a relationship with Anna who, it turns out, is also a stranger in town. She’s employed in the even more absurdist task of imitating the vanished wife of a man we see playing a mournful melodica. She, and other studied simulacrums, go through a series of weird choreographed motions while the men watch at a sort of peep-and-weep show from the other side of a wall

There’s a romantic yearning to the interactions between Anna and Aris that goes beyond the script, as their pensive connection grows against the more general air of abandonment. With minimal scripting the strength of the performances matters, and Papoulia and Passalis – who previously worked together in Dogtooth and The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea – succeed in making the relationship tender and tentative at the same time, suggesting loss even as something is found.

The sound design from Niko Exarhos, Persefone Miliou and Kostas Varympopiotis mixes the otherworldliness of the messages, in which the vanished often instruct their loved ones to never lock doors, with more everyday oddities like the clack of a fan turning or the mayor suddenly breaking into song through his megaphone in the middle of his rally. Meanwhile, the detailed production design from Márton Ágh also gets time to shine thanks to the deliberate, often static, framing from cinematographer Giorgos Karvelis.

While the lack of easy explanations may not be everyone’s cup of tea, Passalis ensures that, no matter how absurd things become, they still retain a sense of logic within the world he has created. Cryptic but not without clues, Silence 6-9 suggests soul-searching is required to find the answers, and that even a solution may not necessarily bring resolution.