No tombs exist in Jess Franco’s The Silence of the Tomb, but that omission is all fine and dandy, considering the cult-fave filmmaker does include something he often neglects: a plot. Bonus: It’s a lucid one at that!
A supposedly fabulous (and definitely fatuous) actress, Annette (Glenda Allen, Franco’s Dolls for Sale) invites all her superficial friends for a wine-and-dine weekend on the island she has purchased with her wealth and now calls home. Well, it’s home when she’s not on set or jet-setting the globe. Her bastard child with film director Jean-Paul (Francisco Acosta, Franco’s Kiss Me Killer) lives there, but is raised by Annette’s extremely jealous sister, Valerie (Montserrat Prous, Franco’s The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff), who serves as our unreliable narrator.
Collective weekend plans of fun in the sun (and sack) go awry when the child disappears from his bedroom, with a ransom note demanding 2 million pesos left in his place. Given the heavy privacy of and limited access to the island, the culprit must be among the 10 or so people sleeping under Annette’s roof — perhaps even Annette herself. But who? And why?
And then the murders begin.
In setting up Silence, writer/director/producer Franco uses Agatha Christie’s iconic And Then There Were None as his jumping-off point, but then veers wildly to give the whodunit his own stamp. The Franco faithful know that typically entails a streak of sexual perversity — just not in this instance. Nor is that cause for alarm, because while The Silence of the Tomb is colorfully accessible to mainstream audiences, this mystery is by no means conventional. From the leisurely score to breathtaking scenery (courtesy of Spain and the striking Prous), enough era-emblematic elements are present for the project to be unmistakably Franco’s, even if he kept it in his pants, so to speak, and even though the story originated in a novel by Enrique Jarnes. Franco changed the book where it counted, primarily to turn the reveal and subsequent explanation into something so ludicrous, we happily can attribute it only to Mr. Vampyros Lesbos himself. Well played, Jesús. —Rod Lott