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This Anglo-Dutch mystery is interested in secondary characters, but it doesn’t leave them much room to breathe.
By Ben Kenigsberg
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“The Bay of Silence” takes your call from a position on Italy’s Ligurian coast. The waters are full of tasty seafood, however, this thriller, about a man looking to perceive his wife’s tangled past, is a false clue.
It is a bath in the bay that Will (Claes Bang) proposes to Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko), a widow and artist with two daughters. Rosalind has a challenge with photographs. In Italy, it prevents Will from taking pictures of herself; at her London home, months later, Rosalind, very pregnant, falls off a balcony while photographing him with her daughters. She survives and gives birth to a baby, but is convinced that she has had duals and that the other has been taken. Will thinks Rosalind is depressed, but her habit is getting weirder.
Caroline Goodall, who plays Will’s boss (working in civic design), adapted the screenplay for a novel through Tecon’s Lisa St. Aubin. The situation presents a table of subplots and disturbing pieces, and then forgets or discards them.
Among those wasted are Alice Krige as Rosalind and Brian Cox’s snob mother as Rosalind’s artistic director and former stepfather. (“Succession” fans may wonder if he is now exclusively interested in roles in which he participates in a specific type of camouflage.)
The director, Paula van der Oest, evokes a bloodless atmosphere when the action passes the visual opposite of the Italian tourist scenes: a desert space on the dark Normandy coast. But there’s less in “The Bay of Silence” than it looks.
The Bay of Silence Duration: 1 hour 33 minutes. In some cinemas and through virtual cinemas.
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