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‘Silenced’: Haunting Korean tale of school abuse

A movie review of "Silenced," a shocking drama about systematic brutality toward children at a school for the hearing-impaired. This South Korean drama is based on a real-life moral and legal scandal.

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So graphic is the violence perpetrated toward children in the South Korean drama “Silenced” that one wonders how well (or not) the feature’s young actors dealt with their distressing scenes.

Based on the 2009 novel “Dogani” by Gong Jee-young, itself a thinly disguised exposé of a real-life case of rampant sexual abuse of deaf kids by one school’s authorities, “Silenced” doesn’t hold much back.

Half the story focuses on grim, shocking details of systematic beatings and rapes of boys and girls at a school for hearing-impaired students in Mujin city. The second half is essentially a courtroom drama in which the victims and their allies face an uphill battle for justice.

The major connecting link is the lead character, an art teacher named Kang In-ho (Gong Yoo) who takes a position at the Mujin school and becomes an advocate for the kids.

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The subsequent trial of the school’s principal and two staffers gets to the heart of the movie’s message. Cronyism, corruption and backward laws stymie the prosecution’s case.

The 2005 trial that inspired this story was decried as an example of unenlightened laws concerning sexual abuse of children and the disabled. This film reportedly created enough stir in South Korea that the country’s National Assembly passed the “Dogani Law,” reforms named for the movie’s Korean title.

The good that “Silenced” has done certainly outweighs its flaws, but there are certainly some of those: character and plot tropes that pad out the story but have little to do with it. (In-ho is a widower with a sickly child; his chief ally is a brassy, iconoclastic human-rights worker.)

While director Hwang Dong-hyuk is committed to brutal honesty, he also flashes an interesting taste for eccentricity, especially in the way he captures the film’s villains. What’s certain is that “Silenced” will haunt a viewer for a while.

Tom Keogh: [email protected]

Film Review ‘Silenced’: How An Unjust System Failed The Survivors Of Sexual & Physical Abuse

TW: Child Sexual and Physical Abuse

The rich and influential have been successfully buying justice, leaving the underprivileged at a disadvantage. This concept is represented by Hwang Dong Hyuk in his Korean movie, Silenced starring Gong Yoo and Jung Yu Mi, released in 2011. It is based on a real life incident covered by Gong Ji Young in her book ‘The Crucible’ which happened at Gwangju Inhwa’s school for the hearing impaired in South Korea. The movie shows the struggle of an art teacher seeking justice for his students who were sexually and physically abused by some members of the faculty. It majorly received a positive review by national and international audience. 

The movie begins on a saddening note which sets the mood for the later incidents. Gang In Ho receives a job as an art teacher at a school for the deaf. Despite his multiple attempts to engage with them, the students remain aloof to his approaches. This concern of his is dismissed by other teachers who also casually ignore when one student being beaten up in front of them and the screams of female students at night. When the perpetrators are put on trial, they are eventually let go, because of corruption, influential connections and negligence of law. The story shows a battle against the unjust judicial system where the weak are eventually silenced when put up against the influential. 

Also read: Netflix Series On Jeffrey Epstein: Child Sex Abuse Survivors Recount Disturbing Experiences

It revolves around the idea of remaining silent. Society is divided into two categories – those who knowingly remain silent and those who are silenced because they dared to speak. in Silenced , teachers witnessing a fellow faculty member beating a student do not object to the act.

It revolves around the idea of remaining silent. Society is divided into two categories – those who knowingly remain silent and those who are silenced because they dared to speak. in Silenced , teachers witnessing a fellow faculty member beating a student do not object to the act. People of the city were not too keen about the case as it would show their city in the bad light. The prosecutor, who had concrete evidence against the perpetrators, was silenced by money. When the public protested against the court’s decision in Silenced , they were removed by police and ultimately silenced by law. 

Reduction in punishment because of the accused’s good deeds in the past is another aspect under question in Silenced . A judge reduced punishment, based solely on the accused’s past apparent good deeds of ‘great contributions to the development of the city ‘, and that he has no previous criminal records. Considering they had taken care of the children first, the sentences were reduced to a maximum punishment of 8 months of imprisonment and 2 years of probation. The gravity of the offence and the physical, emotional and psychological damage done to the victims are not taken into consideration here, but an accused coming from a good catholic family is. Thus, the judgment fully favours the influential perpetrators.

Silenced also highlights out-of-court settlements. A price is placed on the victim’s loss. In case the victim is a kid, the deal is made with their guardian without considering the child’s right to be heard in a trial affecting them directly. This, in Silenced , pointed out at the role that corruption played in furthering the survivor’s trauma. Another side of reality brought under light was the treatment of the physically disabled members of the community by the court. The proceedings which were meant to be for the violation of rights of the hearing impaired in Silenced did not have an interpreter for them, hinting at the contemporary society which inclines towards ableism.  

In Silenced , students are oppressed due to their age, disability and later due to their economic background. They do not understand the nature of the crime except the fact that they are at unease.

When a person belongs to multiple disadvantaged categories, the discrimination faced by them is much worse. In Silenced , students are oppressed due to their age, disability and later due to their economic background. They do not understand the nature of the crime except the fact that they are at unease. A child with disability requires more aid as compared to a disabled adult or an abled child. Not only are they unable to come to terms with their distress but are also not able to express it. 

Shaming a victim of sexual abuse is nothing new, and the same is shown in Silenced . One kid is subjected to physical violence for ‘seducing’ the headmaster. This raises the issue of actions which are seemingly ‘suggestive’ as a common defence against allegations of sexual assault. In case of sexual assault, the victim’s previous conduct is taken into account. Her behavioural history is considered in the trial which includes her clothes, people she talked to, the way she talked, if her conduct was ‘inviting’, ‘if she was asking for it’, etc. Therefore, it is not uncommon in rape laws which intend to protect a woman’s ‘modesty’, to assassinate the female victim’s character in order to ‘reach the truth’. 

The director of Silenced does not shy away from showing explicit scenes which often leaves the viewers with an uncomfortable feeling. Silenced was criticised on this ground by some viewers. It could however be the intention of the director of Silenced for the audience to see and feel an ounce of discomfort which survivors of sexual assault go through during the formidable act and the judicial procedure. He did not wish to end Silenced on a positive note, instead he wanted his audience to realise that such situations in reality did not have a happy ending.

Also read: The Ticking Bomb Called Online Child Sexual Abuse

Silenced sparked an outrage in country against the unfair decision in the trial. This lead to reopening of the case. The school was finally closed in 2011. The laws regarding limitation period were amended. As per the real incident as depicted in Silenced , most of the perpetrators were exempted due to expiration of statute of limitation.

Silenced sparked an outrage in country against the unfair decision in the trial. This lead to reopening of the case. The school was finally closed in 2011. The laws regarding limitation period were amended. As per the real incident as depicted in Silenced , most of the perpetrators were exempted due to expiration of statute of limitation. The amended laws removed the limitation period in cases involving sexual assault were the victim is either below the age of thirteen or a disabled woman. The maximum punishment of the crime was also extended to life imprisonment. Suffice to say, Silenced had a lasting impact on the audience.

Muskan Singla is a law student interested in laws related to gender and medicine. Often found reading mythology or binge watching K-dramas in her free time. She can be found on Instagram .

Featured Image Source: Viki

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Movie review: ‘Silenced’

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‘Silenced’ is harrowing

A recent hit in Korea, “Silenced” (“ Dogani ”) is based on a true story in which administrators at a school for deaf children received extremely light penalties for sexually abusing their young charges.

In the film, a teacher (Gong Yoo) uncovers the awful goings-on and enlists a local human rights worker (Jung Yu-mi) to seek justice. They come to realize that officials are more concerned with sweeping the problem under the rug than bringing vicious predators to justice.

The problem is that director Hwang Dong-Hyuk goes to such wretched lengths to sensationalize the depictions of the crimes — lingering on the testimony of the children as they describe what was done to them with parallel reenactments — that “Silenced” is not a cautionary wake-up call but a sadistic, unsavory document. It’s a child-abuse drama with the look and feel of a horror film.

“Silenced” has become a fulcrum in South Korea for a broader conversation about sexual abuse and its victims, yet the film is so brutal and demoralizing that it does a disservice to the very issue on which it is attempting to shine a cleansing spotlight.

“Silenced.” No MPAA rating. In Korean with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes. At CGV Cinema and Century 20 Huntington Beach.

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Silence Is Easier to Admire Than to Love

Martin Scorsese’s new film about Christian missionaries in 17th-century Japan is a powerful work that is in part undone by the director’s own passion.

Silence , the new film by Martin Scorsese, opens with almost as literal a vision of Hell as one could imagine. The year is 1633; the place, a craggy, volcanic expanse near Nagasaki called Unzen. Through the sulphur fumes and scalding vapor, we see European men, their hands tied, being led by Japanese soldiers to the boiling springs that dot the landscape. Their robes are parted and searing water poured on their skin. In voiceover, it is explained that the ladles used are perforated such that each individual drop may strike the skin “like a burning coal.” The springs themselves are called, aptly enough, jigoku , or “hells.”

The man narrating this excruciating torture is Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a Jesuit missionary. The victims, who number in the dozens, are his fellow Catholic priests. Christianity has been outlawed as a threat to Japanese culture and it is being burned out of the country in the most direct manner available.

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Father Ferreira’s observations are committed to a letter, and it is in that context that we hear them again. It is now 1640, seven years after the horrors he recounted, and a senior Jesuit (Ciarán Hinds) is reading the letter to two young priests who were once Ferreira’s pupils, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver). The elder priest also informs them that Ferreira subsequently disappeared and is rumored to have “apostatized”—that is, renounced God.

Rodrigues and Garupe refuse to believe this of their beloved mentor, and they vow to find him and dispel the slander. Their superior accedes to their mission, though he reminds them of the extraordinary danger they will face from the moment they set foot in Japan: “You will be the last two priests ever sent.”

Silence is based on the celebrated 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō, and Scorsese has been vowing to bring it to the big screen ever since he first read the book in 1989. At the time, he was dealing with the blowback to his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ , and in Endō’s story of faith and doubt, he felt echoes of both his recent experience and his longtime relationship with the Church, of which he had once intended to become a priest.

Nearly 30 years in the making, Silence is a heartfelt and serious work. But through length and redundancy—both, no doubt, the product of Scorsese’s deep admiration for Endō—as well as an underwhelming central performance by Garfield, it ultimately falls short of its powerful ambitions.

The two priests, Rodrigues and Garupe, are smuggled into Japan by Kichijiro (Yōsuke Kubozuka), a fickle and intemperate drunk. (There is a noticeable echo of the legendary Toshiro Mifune in the performance.) There, they encounter a town populated by secret Christians, and their mission begins to shift, from finding and rescuing Ferreira to ministering to these devout peasants, who live in terror of discovery by the authorities. The Japan of these early scenes—conjured by the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto—is a misery of rock and rain, in which mud-bound villages can hope for little more than not to be swept entirely out to sea.

Eventually, official “inquisitors” do come to the town in which the priests are hiding, and the two men are forced to split up. For the remainder of the film, we follow the journey of Rodrigues as he witnesses atrocities against his fellow Christians—crucifixions, drownings, a beheading—grapples with his own faith, and is himself captured. Most of all, he suffers from the apparent “silence” with which God answers his prayers.

The tradeoff repeatedly extended by the authorities to those suspected of Christian belief would seem a simple one. Just place one’s foot on a fumi-e , a small plaque bearing a likeness of Christ or the Virgin, and one will escape punishment and perhaps be freed. Refuse, and one will face torture or worse.

Many of the peasants questioned refuse to step on the fumi-e and suffer accordingly. But many are willing to make that concession—and are, in fact encouraged by Rodrigues to do so—in order to keep their lives. Among the latter is the priests’ initial guide, Kichijiro, whose continued vacillation between apostasy and confession makes him one of the film’s more infuriating and provocatively human figures.

As is no doubt apparent, Silence is not an easy film to watch, its 160-minute running time awash in images of pain and cruelty. But neither is it a mere cinematic exercise in physical endurance or the punishments of the flesh, such as Unbroken or even The Revenant . Scorsese is attempting something far more interesting: a portrait of the endurance of the soul .

It is not, after all, Rodrigues’s body that is being tormented, but those of the people around him. And it is made abundantly clear that it is within his power to make it stop if only he will himself apostatize. As the chief inquisitor, Inoue, cunningly played by Issey Ogata, explains: “We learned from our mistakes. Killing priests only makes them stronger.” Another interrogator puts it still more directly when Rodrigues insists that the victims around him “didn’t die for nothing.” “No,” he replies. “They died for you.”

But for all the torments they inflict, the Japanese inquisitors are no generic movie villains. They truly believe that Christianity is incompatible with the Japanese spirit, an alien pathogen imported by arrogant and incurious Europeans. And the film gives this case its due. It is notable, for instance, that none of the Jesuits we encounter speaks more than a tiny smattering of Japanese, but peasants and inquisitors alike manage to make themselves understood in Portuguese (rendered in the film as English). One of Rodrigues’s captors—played superbly by Tadanobu Asano—is fluent enough to function as a full-time translator.

Indeed, one of the chief weaknesses of Silence is that so many of the characters in orbit around Rodrigues convey more narrative gravity than he does himself: Asano’s translator, Ogata’s inquisitor, Kubozuka’s fickle Kichijiro, Driver’s Father Garupe, a village elder played by Yoshi Oida. Andrew Garfield is a fine actor, but his calling card has always been a kind of boyish ingenuousness, and here it is tested beyond its limits.

Garfield’s previous major role of the year, Hacksaw Ridge , is illustrative. In it, as in Silence , he plays a devout Christian—one who served as an Army medic in World War II and, despite his refusal to carry a firearm, rescued 75 of his gravely injured comrades from the battlefield. But in Hacksaw Ridge , this Christian spirit was emphatic, uplifting, a source of near-limitless strength. It was the solution to the problem at hand. In Silence , by contrast, Garfield faces the far heavier challenge of grappling with the possibility that it might be the problem . Far from saving lives, Rodrigues’s faith is costing them.

Scorsese does Garfield no favors by extending his protagonist’s torments to such extreme lengths. The film is full of moments that, for all their elegance and power, feel repetitive: yet another scene of peasants being commanded to step on the fumi-e ; another brutal torture; another confrontation between Rodrigues and the inquisitors in which each side talks past the other—universal truth versus cultural difference—without success.

These philosophical disputes, too, rarely achieve the depth or richness for which one hopes. Late in the film it is suggested, intriguingly, that perhaps the Christian faith of the Japanese peasants isn’t really Christian at all, that due to a long-ago error of translation, they worship not the “Son,” but the “Sun.” Alas, Scorsese’s film is more interested in cataloguing Rodrigues’s ongoing spiritual anguishes than in pulling further on such theological threads.

It all comes to an end—though I should warn, there’s still a half-hour left—when Rodrigues finally completes his mission and learns the fate of his mentor, Father Ferreira. I will not reveal what he discovers, but I will say that it feels like a moment that could easily have taken place far earlier in the film.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Silence is an indisputably worthy film from one of our greatest living directors, one that searchingly tackles questions of faith and doubt and duty. The visuals supplied by Prieto are themselves worth the price of admission—the desperate peasants crawling up over the side of a boat, like pirates or mermen; a town abandoned to a community of feral cats; a sea cave that functions like a portal from one world to the next. Scorsese’s abiding passion and respect for his source material are everywhere in evidence. For once, perhaps, they are a little too great.

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Silence is beautiful, unsettling, and one of the finest religious movies ever made

Martin Scorsese’s film keenly understands Shūsaku Endō’s novel and challenges believer and nonbeliever alike.

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Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence (first published in Japanese in 1966 as Chinmoku , then translated into English in 1969) is slippery and troubling, a book that refuses to behave. It flatters no reader; it refuses to comfort anyone. In telling the story of Portuguese priests and persecuted Christians in Japan, it navigates the tension between missionary and colonizer, East and West, Christianity and Buddhism and political ideology, but refuses to land on definitive answers.

Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating film Silence is based on Endō’s novel, which he read shortly after his 1988 film Last Temptation of Christ was protested and condemned by the Catholic Church and other conservative Christians 28 years ago. It’s almost impossible to capture the nuances of a novel like Endō’s for the screen; Masahiro Shinoda tried in 1971 , and Endō reportedly hated the ending. But Scorsese comes about as close as one can imagine, and the results are challenging for both the faithful and the skeptic.

The struggle for faith in a world marked by suffering and God’s silence is present in every frame of Silence . The answers in Scorsese’s film, as in Endō’s novel, are found not in words, but in the spaces between them.

Silence is a story of persecution in a Japan seeking to expel foreigners

Silence is the story of two young Portuguese Catholic priests, Father Rodrigues ( Andrew Garfield ) and Father Garrpe ( Adam Driver ). They learn from their superior ( Ciarán Hinds ) that their mentor and former confessor Father Ferreira ( Liam Neeson ), who had gone to Japan as a missionary, is reported to have apostatized — that is, repudiated his faith. The rumor is that he’s now living with his wife among the Japanese.

Unable to believe such a thing of Ferreira, Rodrigues and Garrpe beg and eventually are permitted by the church to travel to Japan, where they arrive in 1639 amid a government ban on Christianity. They meet a fisherman named Kichijiro ( Yôsuke Kubozuka ), who agrees to sneak them onto an island near Nagasaki.

The Japanese government’s opposition to Christianity, and the subsequent movement of worshippers to practicing their faith underground, was the result of a complicated set of political factors. Those factors included the influx of Europeans into the country, which the government viewed as a security threat, as well as the Shimabara Rebellion , a revolt of starving peasants against their lords. The persecution of Christians was partly a way to quash the uprising.

On the island to which Kichijiro brings the priests, a group of Kakure Kirishitan (“hidden Christians”) live, practicing their faith in secret to avoid scrutiny from the government — especially Inquisitor Inoue ( Issei Ogata ), who will torture them until they recant. Inoue’s preferred method of ferreting out believers is to force them to trample on a fumie, a simple carved image of Christ. Those who trample, live. Those who refuse are tortured and killed.

Rodrigues and Garrpe live in secret, ministering to the villagers and others nearby. They feel compassion for the people, who live difficult lives of oppression and starvation. But the priests are betrayed by Kichijiro (who is a Judas figure in the story), separated, and brought under Inoue’s scrutiny.

From there the perspective is largely Rodrigues’s, as he witnesses Christians being tortured and is told that if he apostatizes, if he steps on the fumie and repudiates his faith, the others will be spared. But how can he imagine such a thing? And what would it mean for him — a priest, sworn to serve Christ — to choose to do such a thing? As he sees Japanese Christians being tortured, he calls out for answers. But he receives none in return.

Shūsaku Endō’s writing was filtered through his experience as the Other

Endō was Japanese and a Catholic, which meant that no matter where he went, he was an outsider: His Buddhist countrymen viewed him with suspicion for his religion, while the Europeans among whom he lived for years in France considered him a stranger because of his nationality. He was deeply acquainted with the experience of being the Other, and informed the way he understood most everything.

His outlook was further shaped by insights about the links between soul and body he likely gleaned from years of suffering and hospitalization due to recurring bouts of disease in his lungs (at one point, he spent two years in the hospital). For Endō, there are no easy routes to salvation; a person’s body — its ethnicity, its weaknesses, its susceptibility to pain and desire — is as much his link to the life and sufferings of Christ as a person’s soul. (In one of Endō’s novellas , which is at least partly autobiographical, the protagonist is a Japanese scholar of French literature, who is both grappling with faith and studying the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism is named.)

All of these paradoxes seem to have shaped how Endō thought about the paradoxes of his faith: for instance, the enigma of Christ, who in Christian doctrine is both fully God and fully man. Or the conundrum of Christians being instructed to imitate Christ, while knowing that’s an impossible task for flawed humans. Or the friction between the cultures he strongly identified with, which had to include grappling with both colonialism and oppression.

And as a Catholic, Endō would have believed in the doctrine of Incarnation — that is, the idea that Jesus, the divine Son of God, took on a human body in ancient Israel, during Roman occupation. Jesus lived the life of a carpenter and an itinerant preacher among peasants and villagers, and was eventually executed, his body bruised and pierced, for being a threat to the Roman Empire and the religious leaders who capitulated to it.

So the complexity of entering a culture that is not one’s own was not lost on Endō, and he would see it through the lens of Christ’s experience. But as a person who experienced its pain himself — and as a native of a country marked by colonization — Endō would have complicated feelings about this. People are not Christ. Imitating Christ can mean imitating his incarnation, but nobody can hope to do so without cost, and nobody can do it perfectly. Those complexities surface in Silence .

Scorsese is well-suited to resonate on Endō’s wavelength: a cradle Catholic — he once considered becoming a priest — who has at times been rejected by the church, and a man who is obviously haunted by the connections between body and soul, sin and redemption.

In Silence , Scorsese has found his natural match for plumbing those questions, which he does with considerable restraint. (Readers of Endō’s novel know the descriptions of torture are sickening; in Scorsese’s hands they are more psychologically than visually distressing.) He dives deep, and comes up not with answers so much as an honest suggestion that whenever we think we’ve found the answers, we’ve veered off track. He’s described making the film as a “pilgrimage” of sorts , which denotes both a journey and a struggle, and it shows. Silence is beautifully shot and moving, but it is not what you’d call uplifting. It’s a film that demands reflection, and a rewatch.

To grasp Silence requires seeing it through Rodrigues’s eyes

The strongest, clearest way to understand the story of Silence is through the character of Rodrigues, because his arc hangs on a double thread: that of his role as a European missionary in Japan — what from the 21st century might seem like a “white savior” complex — and that of his place as a priest struggling to understand how to imitate Christ and realizing, slowly, that he can’t, or at least not the way he thought he should.

This relies on recognizing that the story is largely narrated by Rodrigues, and thus shaped by his perceptions. The point at which there’s a noticeable switch in narrators is the film’s inflection point. Everything hinges on that change.

Note: if you want to avoid spoilers, scroll down to the next image .

Silence aims a two-pronged spear right at Rodrigues’s assumptions about his work. He sees himself as a minister to the people of Japan, and so he is: The role of a priest in Catholic doctrine is to embody, in a small way, the intermediary role that Christ plays between the worshipper and God himself. (There’s a moment early on in Silence , when Rodrigues and Garrpe first meet the hidden Christians on the island, in which the hidden Christians explain that in the absence of a priest to administer the sacraments, they’ve come up with a substitute but non-ordained priest, and they wonder if that’s okay. Rodrigues and Garrpe assure them that it is.)

Rodrigues is more flexible in how he applies his understanding of faith to Japanese culture than Garrpe is. When some of his flock ask whether it is okay to trample the fumie to save their own lives, he says it is. But he holds himself, a minister, to a higher standard: It is one thing for the Japanese believer to trample, and another thing entirely for him.

There is some inkling of patronization here (and this is the 1630s, after all). Rodrigues continually speaks of the believers as miserable, suffering, living and dying as beasts; he sees them as human and worthy of salvation, but not exactly as people so much as a mass that needs tending. (For those watching closely, the film is subtly — but perhaps too subtly — critical of this mindset; Rodrigues is no saint.)

But his experience among them is mixed with a strong dose of real belief. Rodrigues is confident, as he tells Inoue in a conversation, that if Christianity cannot be true in every culture than it cannot be true at all. He believes that the good news is good news for everyone, and he is critical of a government that would seek to keep its people from freely worshipping whomever or whatever they wish.

Yet the confrontation of Christianity via Rome with Japanese culture is far more complicated than he imagined. When Rodrigues finally locates Ferreira, the former priest tells him, with sorrow, that Christianity simply cannot take root in Japan, and that there is much truth to be found in Buddhism (the state-mandated religion). This encounter visibly shakes Rodrigues.

The friction between the two — Japanese culture and Christianity — seems to be a lifelong conflict for Rodrigues, even after he finally breaks down and tramples the fumie, saving the Japanese Christians, then remains in the country to live out the rest of his life. He seems broken, his assumptions shattered; when he’s approached to hear a confession years after he leaves the priesthood, he refuses, unwilling to put the supplicant in danger.

Rodrigues’s so-called salvation looks like anything but

But that he does trample the fumie and live out his life in Japan, having publicly repudiated his faith, is both a kind of rebuke and salvation for Rodrigues. In Endō’s novel, and for much of Scorsese’s film, Rodrigues tells his own story in the form of letters, and mimicking that device, the film subtly gives us the story from his point of view. “Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful,” Rodrigues muses after the baptism of a peasant child, whom he characterizes in terms that seem harsh. “The hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt — this is the realization that came home to me acutely at that time.”

It becomes clear that Rodrigues does conceive of himself and his call to imitate Christ as a call to function as a Christ-figure to the people of Japan, suffering and even dying for them if he must. But part of that call requires being the public Christian, the man of God among them. Kichijiro is his Judas, the betrayer, and Inoue is a sort of Satan tempting him with ease and comfort in the midst of his wilderness, just like Christ.

And yet this perception Rodrigues has of himself is complicated by Inoue’s challenge: trample the fumie, and not only will you live easy, but you will save the lives of these others. This is a direct challenge to Rodrigues’s perception of what it means to minister and have faith, one forged in a European context. That the image of Christ calls him to drop his preconceptions rends his heart and challenges him. He must not just repudiate his religious beliefs externally, but also relinquish his own idea of how he’ll serve God, which in turn causes him to wonder whether he is fit to do so at all.

The agony of Rodrigues’s choice to trample the fumie, then, is the agony of letting go of his self-image of faith for another one, an ignominious one in which he will always be the priest who apostatized, no longer the agent of grace and the sacraments to the Japanese. The movie (and the novel) flip to another point of view after Rodrigues’s apostatization, and now we can only see his actions from the outside, rather than experiencing them through the voiceover of his thoughts, agonies, and prayers that we heard before. Rodrigues’s faith, as it were, has become silent. His suffering for Christ isn’t physical, but spiritual: He is questioning whether his faith is faith at all, and whether God is with him even when he seems to be so far away.

But the fumie is an image of the Christ he is meant to imitate, and it is covered in mud, stepped upon by feet, nothing compared to the glorious image he holds in his mind. It’s more in keeping with the Bible’s depiction of Christ (as lowly, crucified in the manner of a thief), but its very kindness in the face of his impending betrayal is enough to break Rodrigues’s heart.

During the film’s telling, climactic moment — when Rodrigues finally tramples on the fumie — you can hear a rooster crow somewhere in the distance. That, of course, is the same thing that happened in the Gospels, when Peter denied Christ before the crucifixion.

Silence challenges the religious and non-religious alike

Since seeing Silence , I’ve been eager to know how others will react to the film. I am a Christian, and Endō’s Silence has been widely read and studied in my community for decades. Even though I’m familiar with the story, I found the film unsettling: The tendency for any religious person is to seek definitive answers for the greatest, most troubling existential questions, and I was confronted with the suffering that can happen on the path to faith, and the doubt that has to be part of that.

But it’s been remarkable to discover that Silence is a challenging film for many critics and early viewers, including those who aren’t interested in religion at all, or who don’t identify with a particular faith. The genius of Endō’s story and Scorsese’s adaptation is that it won’t characterize anyone as a saint, nor will it either fully condone or reject the colonialist impulses, the religious oppression, the apostasy, or the faltering faith of its characters. There is space within the story for every broken attempt to fix the world. Endō’s answer still lies in Christ, but his perception of Christ is radically different from what most people are familiar with — and even those who don’t identify with Christianity will find the film unnerving and haunting.

Silence is the kind of film that cuts at everyone’s self-perceptions, including my own. I haven’t been able to shake it, because I need to remember — now, frankly, more than ever — that I am not able nor responsible to save the world, let alone myself. How the world changes is a giant, cosmic mystery. To grow too far from that and become hardened in my own belief is a danger: I grow complacent and deaf, too willing to push others away.

In Silence , nobody is Christ but Christ himself. Everyone else is a Peter or a Judas, a faltering rejecter, for whom there may be hope anyway. What Scorsese has accomplished in adapting Endō’s novel is a close reminder that the path to redemption lies through suffering, and that it may not be I who must save the world so much as I am the one who needs saving.

Silence opens in limited theaters on December 23 and wide on January 6.

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Review: The Silenced

Like The Handmaiden , The Silenced is a Gothic story about female oppression and how its protagonists struggle and fight against it. It all starts with the title. Its English language title “ The Silenced ” literally implies that the girls at the centre of this story are the “silenced” ones, a reflection of how females are always the ones whose voices are silenced in society.

The story takes place in 1938 with Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Ju-ran ( Park Bo-young ), who also goes by her Japanese name Shizuko, is a meek and frail girl on her way to attend a girls’ boarding school/sanatorium. Ju-ran has weak lungs and the school is meant to help her get better. Strange things start to happen however when girls start disappearing without any reason and Ju-ran starts to lose control of her body.

Like every good Gothic story, the setting is its own character. The school is a work of outstanding production design. The headmistress’ ( Uhm Ji-won ) office is perversely baroque, while the rest of the school is worn out and fittingly Gothic. There’s even a hidden secret basement overgrown with red flowers that looks like something out of The Secret Garden crossed with a Del Toro film. The dimly lit corners in every corridor threatens to swallow its students and is used to great effect in the spookier scenes.

The school is also oppressive and austere, valuing uniformity to keep its students in line, of which there are only 16. They all sleep in two rows in one long room, wear identical nightgowns, school uniforms and hairstyles. The lack of individuality is meant to keep them in line. But it doesn’t just end with their appearances. We witness at the start the confiscation of any personal items Ju-ran has brought in her suitcase, including a diary. When she requests to keep it, she is slapped and falls meekly into line. The erasure of the girls’ identities is reinforced further through the film’s the colonial setting: the girls are required to speak Japanese and use Japanese names, even though it is not part of their cultural identity.

The Silenced ‘s central mystery, that of the disappearing students, only furthers the overarching theme of female oppression. We get hints as to what may be happening when we see several students seizing up before disappearing the next day, as well as Ju-ran’s display of inexplicable and explosive strength. It is then revealed that girls are being experimented on by the headmistress and her team to become genetically modified super soldiers. Teenage girls apparently make for the best test subjects as their bodies are still developing, the film explains. Here, the story draws attention to how teenage girls already have little to no control over their developing bodies by nature and as females in general, they will have no end to the lack of agency they have over their bodies.

The reveal to the mystery at the start of the final act admittedly falls a little flat considering the Gothic nature of the film. But the story pushes forward to ultimately deliver a mostly satisfying final act. The creations — these doll-like teenage girls that have been abandoned, manipulated and silenced all their lives — eventually revolt in a violent and haunting manner against their oppressors. What makes The Silenced even more eerie and tragic though is that much of the horror inflicted on the teenage girls are at the hands of women, whose strings are being pulled by men.

The only balm in this film is the friendship between Ju-ran and Yeon-deok ( Park So-dam ). Yeon-deok takes Ju-ran under her wing immediately after seeing how she is easily bullied by the other girls. She shows her the secret basement, sneaks her out of the school to the river and gives her a diary to replace the one that was confiscated. Park Bo-young and Park So-dam have a genuine chemistry and rapport that helps make their relationship the backbone of the film. The scenes that Ju -ran and Yeon-duk share by the river are beautifully lensed and lit, a complete opposite to the dreary interiors of the school.

Much credit must also go to Park Bo-young, a rising star in Korean cinema. She is wonderfully subtle in the lead role of Ju-ran. She brings a maturity and dignity to the character while still maintaining the innocence and yearning of a teenage girl all through body language and facial expressions, as Ju-ran is a character of few words.

Audiences who go in wanting a truly freaky, Ringu -esque horror are not going to get that as the story here is far more old-fashioned and more akin to Victorian ghost stories where the spookiness is more atmospheric. That’s why while the mystery reveal was necessary to explain the story, it feels jarring and something more out of sci-fi. Still, something can be said about the never-ending folly of humans trying to play God. The Silenced is a strange, tragic, haunting and well-made film. The final act may leave something to be desired but it is still one of the more original mystery-horrors to come out in recent years.

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"Silence" is a monumental work, and a punishing one. It puts you through hell with no promise of enlightenment, only a set of questions and propositions, sensations and experiences.

It is no surprise to learn that the film's director, Martin Scorsese , has been working on it for decades, since he first read the 1966  source novel   by Shûsaku Endô about Jesuit priests suffering for their faith in 17th century Japan, where Christianity is outlawed. I can't think of another Scorsese film that's so intent on simply showing us things and letting us consider their meaning. There's a little bit of voiceover narration and a few shots that go inside characters' perceptions, but for the most part you're an observer, watching people from a purposeful distance. The film starts with a long moment of actual silence, and embraces silence throughout its running time, or something akin to silence. Wood burning, waves crashing, wind moving through grass: this is what you often hear in place of a musical score. When "Silence" is not quiet, you wish that it were, because the soundtrack is filled with moans of pain and screams of agony and the sounds of bones being broken and flame searing flesh. And, of course, during such moments you fear silence, too, because the grave is silent.

The story is simple: two priests ( Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver ) leave Portugal for Japan to find a third priest ( Liam Neeson ) who has gone missing while working as a missionary. The third priest is believed to have committed apostasy by stepping on an image of Jesus Christ after being tormented by the Japanese. Eventually, one of these wandering priests—Garfield's character, Father Sebastião Rodrigues—gets captured and goes through a similar experience, surviving torture and witnessing the torture of others while pondering unanswerable questions: How much suffering can a man take before breaking and renouncing that which is most important to him? If he does break, does it mean he has failed God? Does God want him to resist blasphemy no matter what the cost? Or does he want the priest to give up and renounce his faith, secure in the knowledge that God's love is great enough to forgive him for not being able to endure unendurable pain? Is God indifferent to the suffering? Does He even notice it?

The movie starts with the first priest, Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Neeson), witnessing mass torture of Christians and being told that if he will only commit apostasy, the suffering will cease. The story then jumps forward many years to find Father Rodrigues and his partner, Father Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), as they make their way to Japan by way of Macao (with help from a Japanese Christian whose own faith seems reawakened by serving as their guide). The first hour of the film is a somewhat picaresque narrative that slowly builds dread as the priests get closer to figuring out what happened their predecessor. The Japanese authorities don't take kindly to Europeans wandering around their island nation talking about the glories of Jesus. In fact, they see Christianity as a cancer to be cut from the body politic.

In the film's second half, Father Rodrigues finds himself locked in a wooden cage and forced to watch and hear the torture of Japanese Christians—some of whom followed and helped him. He is plagued by doubts, not just about the wisdom of coming to Japan or his capacity to survive this ordeal, but the wisdom of the missionary enterprise, which expects people to suffer and die on behalf of ideals. The priest even begins to wonder what God wants, what He's thinking, and whether He has a point-of-view on misery and pain.

What would Jesus do? A lot of people in Father Rodrigues' position would interpret that as a physical challenge:  if Christ withstood the agonies of the cross, I can get through this.  But Christ wasn't mortal, so it's an unfair test. But what if the unfairness of the test is the test? And what of the other prisoners in the facility with the priest? All it would take to end their suffering—or so the priest is told—is one footprint on the image of the savior. Is it moral to allow others to suffer when their suffering can be ended with a single symbolic gesture? Would God want that? Maybe the priest is destined to realize that it’s all right to apostatize if it ends the pain of others. 

Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Jay Cocks —the two did uncredited rewrites on " The Last Temptation of Christ "—have been accused by some of my colleagues of glorifying the European missionaries, or at least not examining them in a critical enough way. I didn’t get this out of “Silence” at all. In fact, one of the things that impressed me most about it was the care it devotes to understanding the position of the Japanese authorities. Without condoning their brutality, it lets a major character—Inoue Masashige ( Issei Ogata ), one of the officials in charge of eradicating Christianity from Japan, and the supervisor of the hero’s suffering—explain the official point-of-view on Western religion. He doesn’t just consider it a corrupting influence on Japanese culture, he doubts that Christianity can truly take root in the “swamp” (his word) of his home country. There are echoes here of another recurring Scorsese fascination, the self-preservation instinct of the tribe. The tribe may tolerate rebellion, heresy or external threats up to a point, but after that they crack down mercilessly. 

Scorsese's respectful distance makes the suffering more unbearable than it would be if he showed every atrocity in close-up. It's unsettling because it conflates the point-of-view of God and the point-of-view of the audience. You're paralyzed. You want to act, or you want the movie to act, to stop the suffering, but the suffering continues until finally it doesn't. We're watching men of God being tested. Try as they might, they cannot entirely wrap their minds around the purpose of the test, and when they do grapple with it, they worry that they've arrived at the wrong conclusion. They worry that they’ve missed the point; that they're not faithful enough or smart enough to understand why this horror exists, or must exist. I don’t know what to think of the ending of the film, which I won’t discuss here except to say that I’ve changed my mind about it many times, and that it seems to be constructed to encourage viewers to come at it again from new angles rather than settling on a single conclusion. This is not the sort of film you “like” or “don't like.” It's a film that you experience and then live with. 

Scorsese has been here before, in one sense or another—not just in straightforwardly theological dramas such as " Kundun " and "The Last Temptation of Christ," but in his crime pictures and thrillers as well. The entire running time of "Silence" could be the self-flagellating fantasy of the young hoodlum hero of Scorsese's 1973 breakthrough " Mean Streets " as he holds his hand over a flame (the title character in " Taxi Driver " did the same thing), and the terrors visited upon the priests and their flock are sadistic enough to have come straight from the reptile brain of Max Cady in " Cape Fear ," a devil or demon figure who exists to punish people for the sins of weakness, hypocrisy and pride. But "Silence" foregrounds such things in the manner of a parable that is not intended to lead the listener to a single realization but to stimulate thought and emotion.

This, too, is characteristic of Scorsese, who studied to be a priest but became a monk for cinema, and who nonchalantly describes himself as a "lapsed Catholic" yet has been preoccupied with sin and salvation for nearly 50 years and weaves Christian themes, imagery and situations throughout his work. You even find them in what might otherwise be straightforward commercial genre projects—"Cape Fear," " The Departed " and " The Color of Money " spring to mind—in which Scorsese seems to be using theology to frame his story and characters in ways that he understands, maybe as a way of personalizing a story that's not all that personal otherwise. For a lapsed Catholic he sure does see the entire world in terms of imponderables and spiritual tests. Maybe there’s an alternate reality in which Scorsese became a priest. I bet he was a good one.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film Credits

Silence (2016)

Rated R for some disturbing violent content.

161 minutes

Andrew Garfield as Father Sebastião Rodrigues

Adam Driver as Father Francisco Garrpe

Liam Neeson as Father Cristóvão Ferreira

Ciarán Hinds as Father Valignano

Issei Ogata as Inoue

Tadanobu Asano as Interpreter

Shinya Tsukamoto as Mokichi

• Martin Scorsese

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Shûsaku Endô

Cinematographer

• Rodrigo Prieto
• Thelma Schoonmaker
• Kathryn Kluge
• Kim Allen Kluge

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2011 ‘도가니’ Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk

The hideous truth, concealed far too long.

Based on actual events that took place at Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, where young deaf students were the victims of repeated sexual assaults by faculty members over a period of five years in the early 2000s.

Gong Yoo Jung Yu-mi Kim Hyun-soo Jung In-seo Baek Seung-hwan Jang Gwang Kim Joo-ryoung Kim Min-sang Lim Hyun-sung Jeon Kuk-hwan Choi Jin-ho Kwon Hong-suk Uhm Hyo-seop Park Hye-jin Kim Ji-young Kim Ji-young Uhm Ji-sung Lee Sang-hee Nam Myung-ryeol Park Kyoung-hee Jang So-yeon Hong Seok-yeon Heo Jae-ho Jung Hyung-suk

Director Director

Hwang Dong-hyuk

Producers Producers

Do Young-hoon Bae Jeong-min

Writer Writer

Original writer original writer.

Gong Ji-young

Editor Editor

Hahm Sung-won

Cinematography Cinematography

Kim Ji-yong

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Park Jung-bae

Lighting Lighting

Park Ju-hyun

Camera Operator Camera Operator

Kim Byung-seo

Production Design Production Design

Chae Kyung-sun

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Park Ui-dong

Composer Composer

Sound sound.

Han Myung-hwan Lee Seung-chul Park Hyun-soo

Costume Design Costume Design

Rim Seung-hee

Makeup Makeup

Sangeori Pictures Fantagio CJ Entertainment

Releases by Date

22 sep 2011, 03 may 2012, 11 nov 2016, 03 nov 2021, releases by country.

• Digital 18 Netflix
• Theatrical 18
• Theatrical 15+

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Popular reviews

Review by Peaceful Stoner ★★★★★ 26

There is a simple sign language to greet the current law system.

Raise both your hands to the level of your shoulders with both the palms facing upwards. Now make a clenched fist in both the hands. Grind your teeth and let the anger broil inside you, to the extent of evanescing your benign law abiding self. Now this is the most important part. From the tightly clenched fist raise both the middle fingers and show it to the lady who is blind folded, to the balance scale she holds and to the substance which feeds her and makes her scale tip to such deplorable depths, money.

This film had me enraged, touched my heart, made me shed tears at…

Review by rachel ★★★★½ 10

i feel sick. that was absolutely brutal to watch, and the fact this is based on a true story just makes me want to die. i will never watch this again but what a powerful and well-made film, and i’m glad i’ve watched it because it is so important. the acting was absolutely exceptional, especially from the children.

if you are watching this because it’s from the creator/director of squid game, please don’t expect anything remotely similar, and if you are easily triggered by child/sexual abuse please don’t watch this film.

Review by Invincible Asia ★★★★½

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As I mentioned in my review of "The Hunt" starring Mads Mikelsen I consider child abuse the most horrifying atrocity a human can commit. That there are adults that force themselves upon children and even find…

Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★★★ 8

The shocking but true story depicting the horrifying abuse and molestation of deaf children by the very people whose job it was to protect and care for them.. What happens to them afterwards is even more horrifying! It moved me to tears, I know it will move you!

The film took great pleasure in playing Whack-A-Mole with my heart! At one point I was absolutely livid! Surely there must have been smoke coming from my ears! I know I was so distressed and agitated that I longed for someone to be there for me and talk me down from this precipice I found myself standing on!

It is a devastating watch! Trust me I'm a tough old broad and I've…

Review by Farhan Al Azhar ★★★★★ 8

This is based on actual events that happened in Gwang Ju, South Korea. People assume that actual events were dramatized in the movie, but apparently the actual events were more heinous than the movie. I heard that it's actually the idea of Gong Yoo (the main actor of the movie) to shoot this after reading the novel while serving his mandatory military service. He wanted more people to know about this horrible truth. He wanted to raise the attention of the public.

Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★½ 12

As heartbreaking and infuriating as the reviews pointed out. And the fact that it is based on real life makes everything here make your blood boil for the cruelty, ignorance and injustice that so many must live and endure, and you literally have a group that has no voice to speak out, and without going into too many spoilers, even get the chance to "speak out", the corruption across the board cuts off any hope. The film, for better or worse, goes even further by showing graphic scenes of both physical and sexual child abuse that is unlikely to leave anyone with the slightest ounce of humanity to flinch. The music is great, somewhat manipulative, but really good accompanied by…

Review by kyrs ★★★★

i am so utterly devastated. what a sick and cruel world we live in

Review by London ★★★★★ 1

Silenced is a film that will absolutely destroy you. Even on a second watch, it wasn't any easier. It broke me. It destroyed me. But it is also such an incredible film. For the usual reasons, a haunting soundtrack, incredible performances, particularly with Gong Yoo having the performance of his career, and being able to joke and laugh and have compelling kind characters in a world made of pain and agony. But Silenced is special for one particular reason.

This gets into spoilers, so if you have any inclination to watch the film and care about knowing about this true story, go watch the film and stop reading.

The people in this film get away. They got away with atrocities…

Review by Bri ★★★★★ 3

One of the most depressing movies ever made

Review by Kat ½ 1

cw: mentions of rape, csa

This is a film about a genuine evil that made national news in Korea. Audiences reacted to Silenced with such horror and people began to protest so loudly that Korea reopened the case and began to pass more laws to protect children from sexual predators.

The way that this film frames this event is melodramatic to the point where you wonder whether the directors really wanted to shed light on the event and bring justice for the children, or just needed a tragedy to dramatize and exploit. And I don't care what you have to say, there was nothing that justified shooting and acting that extensive and disturbing scene between the child actor and…

Review by Ben ★★★★ 2

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Review by sofi✨ ★★★★ 1

it took me a while to digest this. yet, as shocking and devastating as it is, it also is really well made —and extremely important

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Challengers

Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend.

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Review: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too

The saucy tennis melodrama “Challengers” is all about the emotional games we play with each other, though there are certainly enough volleys, balls and close-up sweat globules if you’re more into jockstraps than metaphors.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino ( “Call Me By Your Name” ) puts an art-house topspin on the sports movie, with fierce competition, even fiercer personalities and athletic chutzpah set to the thumping beats of a techno-rific Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score. “Challengers” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) centers on the love triangle between doubles partners-turned-rivals ( Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor ) and a teen wunderkind ( Zendaya ) and how lust , ambition and power dynamics evolve their relationships over the course of 13 years.

The movie opens with Art (Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the It couple of pro tennis: He’s eyeing a U.S. Open title, the only tournament he’s never won, while she’s his intense coach, manager and wife, a former sensation along the lines of a Venus or Serena whose career was cut short by a gnarly knee injury. To build up his flagging confidence after recent losses, Tashi enters Art in a lower-level event that he can dominate – until he faces ex-bestie Patrick (O’Connor) in the final match.

Justin Kuritzkes’ soapy screenplay bounces between that present and the trios’ complicated past via flashbacks, starting when Art and Patrick – a ride-or-die duo known as “Fire and Ice” – both have eyes for Tashi. All three are 18 and the hormones are humming: The boys have been tight since they were preteens at boarding school, but a late-night, three-way makeout session, and the fact that she’ll only give her number to whoever wins the guys' singles match, creates a seismic crack that plays itself out over the coming years.

All three main actors ace their arcs and changing looks over time – that’s key in a nonlinear film like this that’s all over the place. As Tashi, Zendaya plays a woman who exudes an unshakable confidence, though her passion for these two men is seemingly her one weakness. Faist (“West Side Story”) crafts Art as a talented precision player whose love for the game might not be what it once was, while O’Connor (“The Crown”) gives Patrick a charming swagger with and without a racket, even though his life has turned into a bit of a disaster.

From the start, the men's closeness hints at something more than friendship, a quasi-sexual tension that Tashi enjoys playing with: She jokes that she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker” yet wears a devilish smile when Art and Patrick kiss, knowing the mess she’s making.

Tennis is “a relationship,” Tashi informs them, and Guadagnino uses the sport to create moments of argumentative conversation as well as cathartic release. Propelled by thumping electronica, his tennis scenes mix brutality and grace, with stylish super-duper close-ups and even showing the ball’s point of view in one dizzying sequence. Would he do the same with, say, curling or golf? It’d be cool to see because more often than not, you want to get back to the sweaty spectacle.

Guadagnino could probably make a whole movie about masculine vulnerability in athletics rather than just tease it with “Challengers,” with revealing bits set in locker rooms and saunas. But the movie already struggles with narrative momentum, given the many tangents in Tashi, Art and Patrick’s thorny connections: While not exactly flabby, the film clocks in at 131 minutes and the script could use the same toning up as its sinewy performers.

While “Challengers” falls nebulously somewhere between a coming-of-age flick, dysfunctional relationship drama and snazzy sports extravaganza, Guadagnino nevertheless holds serve with yet another engaging, hot-blooded tale of flawed humans figuring out their feelings.

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Album review

On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.

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By Lindsay Zoladz

If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.

Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.

What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.

Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”

At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track , on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth ?! — is strangely humanizing.

Taylor Swift’s New Album Reviewed

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. ( Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

That song , though, is one of the album’s best — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of fresh air and allows Swift to harness a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” another lovely entry, is the rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s voice not in rigid electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something friends who “all smell like weed or little babies.”

It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” which bristles with indignation over a grand, booming palette. Given the enormous cultural power that Swift wields, and the fact that she has played dexterously with humor and irony elsewhere in her catalog, it’s surprising she doesn’t deliver this one with a (needed) wink.

Plenty of great artists are driven by feelings of being underestimated, and have had to find new targets for their ire once they become too successful to convincingly claim underdog status. Beyoncé, who has reached a similar moment in her career, has opted to look outward. On her recently released “Cowboy Carter,” she takes aim at the racist traditionalists lingering in the music industry and the idea of genre as a means of confinement or limitation.

Swift’s new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of “The Tortured Poets Department” are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous “But Daddy I Love Him,” the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best” who cluck their tongues at our narrator’s dating decisions. (Some might speculate that these are actually shots at her own fans.) “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is probably the most satisfyingly vicious breakup song Swift has written since “All Too Well,” but it is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?

That’s a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on “Midnights,” an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of “The Tortured Poets Department” that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept back into Swift’s lyricism. It is almost singularly focused on the salvation of romantic love; I tried to keep a tally of how many songs yearningly reference wedding rings and ran out of fingers. By the end, this perspective makes the album feel a bit hermetic, lacking the depth and taut structure of her best work.

Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic)

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .