The quiet roar

It's not very often that a movie opens with a disclaimer, saying that in order to enjoy this film, you need to stop thinking. Don't try to understand or analyze, just relax and go along with what ever is happening.

For the first 20 minutes or so I tried this, and what I experienced was something quite unique. I wasn't watching a movie, I was watching a painting come alive before my eyes.

Magical vistas, framed by a gentle camera in constant motion and a silence that made you deaf. It was truly beautiful. After after a while I had to turn on my brain though, I realised that I had stopped breathing, and that's when the spell was broken.


The quiet roar is a relationship drama with hints of Sci-Fi. It explores the notion of coming to terms with ones past in the face of death, or rather accepting your fate at the end of your life. Trying to understand past choices and finding the reason, or accepting the outcome of those choices. A very heavy bunch of subjects that could easily be a very interesting bunch of subjects when given the specific ingredients they require.
The quiet roar fails at this. Not for the obvious reasons. The director, and writer, Fredrik Hellström has chosen to almost completely ignore the story he has written and focuses on the beauty of the swedish nature (a constant backdrop to the dreamy cinematography) and in the 77 minutes the film lasts, maybe 15 minutes is spent on the story and characters.

To what supposed effect he makes these choices, I don't know. The final product falls very ahort of the masterpiece it could have been. What we are left with is a hauntingly beautiful movie (I teared up halfway through because of the wonderful landscapes) that is almost totally devoid of... well, anything.

Eva-Britt Strandberg does the most with what little material she is handed. A few times she is actually very good and managea to bring some very needed humanity to the movie. The other actors do a decent to half assed job at portraying the shallow and very alien characters that inhabit the script.


The quiet roar wasn't a bad movie, but it wasn't very good either. It had some very good moments but they weren't enough to balance out the emptiness.


The quiet roar... actually a very fitting name now that I think about it.