This movie really threw me with its opening, which turns out to be one of the best movie openings I’ve seen. I wasn’t expecting much from the movie, so much so that when the false movie started playing out and getting more and more far-fetched (the idea is that we’re watching a very bad movie being filmed), I really thought that the movie itself was going to be that bad. But Mute Witness turns out to be a great Hitchcockian thriller, using a gimmick (the mute witness part) that I’ve genuinely not seen done before. Had Hitchcock himself been handed this script, I’m almost certain he would have done it – there’s so much that’s cinematic about a girl who can’t make a sound having to run from horrors. The initial murder scene is beautifully done – the girl clearly screams and if it weren’t for her condition, she’d be done for – yet as she screams, the girl being murdered screams too, creating a totally unique combination of image and sound. Then there’s the use of the look in the girls’ eyes, that’s used repeatedly throughout the movie and finally in the climax. This is an extremely visual movie. The only thing that bugged me a little about it was the attempt at comedy between the girl’s sister and her boyfriend – kind of took me out of the story too much.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2004 at 8:33 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.