PROJECT SILENCE Review: A Bite-full Of Popcorn Thrills Worthy Of Its Bark
Kim Tae-gon’s Project Silence is now available in the U.S. on Blu-Ray and DVD from Capelight Pictures and Dark Sky Films.
Project Silence is one of those films that should have been a bigger deal for genre and Asian film fans than it was. Instead, its arrival came following the death of its lead star, Lee Sun-kyun, back in December of 2023, casting a sobering shadow on film releases going forward.
For this, Project Silence is worth the analysis, although any bias for one of the industry’s most impressive actors to date is imaginably hard to avoid. Here, Lee takes on another firm and physically demanding role from a script by Kim Yong-hwa, and co-writer director Kim Tae-gon who also directs. Championing Project Silence is a plot that unravels, bringing the film’s title to the very core of all the goings-on as a failed military experiment runs amuck.
The politically dutiful and opportunistic Cha Jung-won (Lee) finds himself at a major impasse beyond the rough relationship he has with his daughter, Cha Kyung-min (Kim Soo-ahn), when devastation hits both sides of a bridge during their trip to the airport. As more than a hundred survivors congregate amid the anarchy, a bloody bodycount ensues as the result of an accidentally unleashed pack of genetically-enhanced counterterrorist dogs.
Panic escalates among the remnant survivors, leaving Cha and just a handful of others tasked with summoning their uses as best as possible to learn more about the vitiated canine program while surviving the attack, as well as a crumbling bridge. Little do they know is whether or not their chances will improve when bureaucracy infringes, ensuing a government campaign to hide the truth at any cost.
As far as crowdpleasing action horror genre mash-ups go, Project Silence does fairly well for its runtime. I enjoyed the tone and timbre it carries in its overall execution of the familiar horror formula, although what the more impossible areas are much ado with the smaller nitpicks that are characteristic with horror films – things like characters veering toward unsafe places out of curiosity and languishing in one spot a little longer than they should. To be fair, nitpicks like these feel somewhat reflective of real life considering how short humanity tends to fall at times on the intellect scale. Thankfully though, these moments don’t get too absurd, except the one that counts most, and it’s all downhill from there, but in a good way.
Co-star Ju Ji-hoon’s incorrigible and misunderstood gas station worker lends feasible support with a spot of eccentrism to boot, while Kim Hee-won’s role as the doctor comes with a prevalent air of untrustworthiness to co-sign his Nuremburg defense-level rationalizing. Park Ju-hyun recurs throughout as Sim Yoo-ra, a jaded golf champion who manages to put her irons to good use with the help of her assistant Mi-ran (Park Hee-von).
The relationships to pay close attention to are the ones permeating between Cha and Secretary of Security Jung (Kim Tae-woo), and his waning connection with his daughter. The latter is addressed only a few times in the movie, although it’s an underlying arc that gets handily dealt with as the story balances out between all the moving and accruing pieces. By the second half, Cha is all but a man transformed in the heat of a crisis, one where he finally realizes what his priorities are, and you’re with him until the end.
What sort of ends up taking a backseat throughout the ordeal is the oblique messaging pertaining to man’s cruelty on animals. Par for the course is the introduction of Echo 9, the primordial bulldog from which the other dogs were cloned, and her mission of “vengeance” dating back to the travesties she witnessed while caged in the lab. This aspect is only addressed as far as the story will allow for the human cast to prevail, which kind of results in Echo 9 peeling off in the background, and you’re left waiting to see if anything happens before the credits roll.
I kind of expected this particular element of Project Silence to unfold a different way, to be honest. Optimistically, the film does leave something of an open-end by the finish. This all comes after a lean, hearty ninety minutes of harrowing thrills and high drama, topped off by Lee’s protagonist role sticking it to the man in proper fashion. Project Silence isn’t perfect, but it is pure popcorn entertaiment featuring a cast with an actor still worthy of his flowers, albeit posthumously.
