Released in 2020, this action thriller movie titled The Silencing was directed by Robin Pront, and its screenplay was written by screenwriter Micah Ranum. The movie had been in the making since 2018, when it was first announced that actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau had joined the leading cast.
The American-Canadian film has actor Nikolaj as Rayburn Swanson along with Annabelle Wallis in the role of Sheriff Alice Gustafson, Hero Fiennes Tiffin in the role of Brooks Gustafson, Zahn McClarnon in the role of Karl Blackhawk, Danielle Ryan as Dr. Patel, and a few others to form the small yet talented cast of the film.
The mystery plot of the movie is all about a hunter and a sheriff coming together to hunt down a murderer who just might have been the one who kidnapped the hunter’s daughter many years before. The movie was originally supposed to premiere at the South by Southwest festival, but with the pandemic interfering with the flow of things, the release had to be canceled.
It was finally released to the audience on DirecTV in mid-July 2020 after the release was postponed by almost five months. The movie had a mild reception, with mixed reviews from fans and critics. Many agreed that while the film did have a way of unfolding the story intriguingly, it failed to come up with a strong plot. It is more or less about the murder-mystery vibes than the story and characters themselves.
While the movie does have a strong and talented cast, its potential does not seem to have been utilized completely. But if you are a murder mystery fanatic, we would still recommend you watch the film since it does manage to keep up the underlying mystery-thriller mood it was originally aiming for.
Continue reading till the end if you want to know more about the plot of the movie, along with the explanation of its ending.
The Silencing Ending Explained
The movie introduces us to our leading character, Rayburn Swanson, a former hunter who now operates and runs a sanctuary called Gwen Swanson Sanctuary, named after his daughter, who went missing years ago. The loss of the daughter had turned him into an alcoholic who had left his hunter life behind.
We are told that while he enjoyed his lifestyle, his daughter was not a huge fan of his trapper ways and had wanted him to quit. He opened the sanctuary after Gwen went missing as a way of punishing himself for leaving his daughter alone in the car five years ago, which is also when she had gone missing.
He had stepped out of his car briefly to get rum, and now, with his daughter gone, he had given in completely to the addiction. He manned the sanctuary and kept the hunters away by keeping an eye on them through the CCTV cameras.
The first of the hunt
Once familiar with his story, we are introduced to the town’s sheriff, Alice Gustafson, the sister of Brooks Gustafson, another troubled character in the story. We see Alice coming across a dead body by the town’s lakeside, the body belonging to a young girl with a deep scar on her neck.
Next to the body, she had also discovered a spearhead fixed into a tree trunk. With the dead body and the spearhead taken in as evidence, investigation commences, and news of a dead girl’s body being discovered spreads like wildfire, even reaching Rayburn in the process.
We are not sure if Rayburn had wanted the dead body to be his daughter’s or not, but after examining it, he tells the authorities that it is not Gwen. It leaves both him and the audience hoping for a miracle, but it just might be too far-fetched.
Meet the hunter
Once back at the sanctuary, Rayburn spots some strange movements in the wood, only to find a man disguised in a ghillie suit. His attempts to confront the man end up unsuccessful, though he does manage to mark the man’s truck with an ‘x’ mark on the fender, just in case.
Back at the sanctuary, he notices in one of the cameras that a girl is being hunted in the woods, and he brings her back to safety only to realize that she has the same scar on her throat as the dead girl and that the scar has rendered her completely mute.
The next day, the hunter makes a return to get back the girl, introduced to us as Molly, and in the process of it all, Rayburn ends up getting hurt, and Molly gets stabbed by a similar spearhead. The sheriff arrives at the location, but the way the situation appears to her, she ends up suspecting Rayburn as the potential killer.
But before she can do something about her suspicions, the hunter appears once again, and the realization dawns upon Alice that it just might be her troubled brother, Brooks, playing a hunter in the woods. Wanting to give Brooks a second chance, along with the fact that he is still her family, Alice ends up shooting Rayburn, giving Brooks a moment to escape.
Rayburn’s plan
Alice, with plans of throwing the blame on Rayburn to make sure her brother remains safe, tries to go after him but gets captured by a bear trap. She still manages to give out an order for his arrest, and Rayburn ends up fleeing to the only safe place he can find, his ex-wife Debbie’s place.
Rayburn gets taken to a hideout to get treated, but against his luck, Brook also ends up reaching the same place. Karl, Debbie’s current husband and also the sheriff of the local Indian Tribal Police, arrests Brooks, and while this was all going down in the factory where they all were, Alice was facing a moral dilemma.
Molly getting attacked and Rayburn being so close to the hunter seemed to have brought him to his senses, and we see him throw out all of his alcohol with a determined look in his eyes, one that had just one goal: catching the hunter.
He finds a way to get to the marked truck and also manages to break into the house where it was parked. Turns out his hunch was right because the house not only had the same clothes the hunter was wearing along with the weapons that had been used on the victims.
He finds missing posters as well, including one of his daughters. While taking a tour of the house, Rayburn finds yet another victim of this serial hunter, another girl with her throat cut open very neatly. But in an attempt to help the girl, Rayburn’s guard lowers enough not to notice the hunter entering the room, allowing him to knock him unconscious.
The real killer
Alice, while in Dr. Joe Boone’s office, also the doctor who was called in to help fix Rayburn at the factory after he had been shot by Alice, notices something familiar in one of the photographs he had of his daughter in his office. She seemed to have the same initials that were found on the tree trunk where the first dead body had been discovered.
She is quick to realize that it was not her brother who was the killer after all, but it was Dr. Boone who had been kidnapping and killing girls around the town. Alice sends an order for Boone’s house to be raided, and it turns out to be the same house that Rayburn had discovered.
While the dispatched police still had time to reach Boone’s place, we find the latter explaining his situation to Rayburn. He tells him that he lost his daughter, the one in his office, to a drunk driving accident, and ever since then, he had made it his mission to save kids, teen girls only, from who he thought were bad parents and Rayburn was just one of them, there were no personal strings attached.
Once done explaining his situation, Boone does what he knows best. He drags Rayburn to his sanctuary only to ask him to run, or better, try to escape, and Boone would do his best to catch him. It is clear that Boone took pleasure in this psychopathic hunting roleplay and was doing this to make the kill more exciting.
The ending explained
The loss of his daughter had left him completely mental, but things did not go as he wanted because Rayburn had heard enough. He lets his anger take over completely, causing him to start beating the life out of Boone.
Alice also reaches the site and tries to stop Rayburn, but the rage he has in him cannot be controlled. He ends up throwing Boone into one of the traps he set up in the sanctuary, and it brutally injures the hunter. He does not bother taking him out of the trap and lets him die on the spot.
Alice, despite witnessing it all, does not alert the police, and the hunt for Boone continues. Before the movie ends, we see Rayburn get the closure he deserves, maybe even some peace. He and his ex-wife, Debbie, hold a funeral for their dead daughter, and Molly attends it too.
In the final scene, we witness Rayburn empty his last bottle of alcohol into the lake, the unopened one that he had bought the day his daughter went missing. The movie ends with a surface-level hope that all would be fixed if we just dealt with our traumas head-on.
While it is a sweet thing to think of, things in real are much more complicated. However, we can take the hopeful end of the story as plausible in a fictional world.
