The Silence/Das Letzie Schweigen

Directed by Baran bo Odar. Starring Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Burghart Klaußner, Katrin Saß, Sebastian Blomberg Club, QFT, Belfast, 120 min

THIS GRIPPING and chilly German drama begins with the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. We’re spared the details as both the callous killer paedophile and his victim disappear into a cornfield. Yet the obfuscation offers no comfort. The perpetrator dumps the child’s body in a lake and escapes, leaving us to wonder how his silent accomplice, a witness to the whole grisly incident, came to be there.

Mittich ( The White Ribbon'sBurghart Klaußner), the cop who failed to solve the case in 1986, is still haunted by the details as he retires. He's not alone. Decades after the original event, another 11-year-old girl on a bike disappears in the exact same spot.

Desperate for closure and determined to catch the culprit this time, Mittich offers his services to the resentful detective who took up his post. He isn’t interested. The older man then turns instead to a distraught, recently widowed cop (Sebastian Blomberg, wonderful), one of the lowlier officers working on the the case. Their alliance makes for a blistering police procedural shot in grand, handsome tableaux and punctuated by Michael Kamm and Kris Steininger eerie score, one of the year’s best.

On the surface it's The Kingdomoutdoors, but underneath The Silenceis festooned with revelations about guilt and grieving and loneliness, disclosures that are almost as discombobulating as the case details.

Have we just found Michael Haneke’s spiritual heir in director Baran bo Odar? We do hope so.