Silent Panic

An earnest yet mostly ineffective indie, Silent Panic follows three friends as they discover a dead body in their car’s trunk after returning from an overnight camping trip – with the narrative subsequently detailing the aftermath of the characters’ decision not to report the corpse to the police. There’s ultimately never a point at which writer/director Kyle Schadt is able to wholeheartedly draw the viewer into the deliberate proceedings, as Silent Panic suffers from a palpably low-rent feel that’s reflected in its myriad of attributes – from the amateurish performances to the unconvincing dialogue to the decidedly difficult-to-swallow plot twists. (It’s clear, in terms of the latter, that the protagonists’ boneheaded, confounding choice to initially eschew the police’s involvement negatively colors virtually everything that subsequently occurs.) And while Schadt has admittedly peppered the picture with a handful of tense sequences (eg one of the protagonists races to the car before his girlfriend can open the trunk), Silent Panic’s distressing lack of momentum ensures that it’s only successful in fits and starts – with Schadt’s ongoing efforts at cultivating an atmosphere of escalating momentum, as a result, generally falling completely flat. The somewhat underwhelming finale does little to alleviate the pervasively hands-off vibe, to be sure, which finally does cement Silent Panic’s place as an almost watchable first effort for a filmmaker with a modicum of potential.

** out of ****