The latest output from the team at Walter Presents sees them heading east to Ukraine and Croatia in a harrowing tale about people trafficking in Eastern Europe.
If you want to avoid spoilers for ‘The Silence’, stop reading this article now.
The first season of ‘The Silence’ (original known as ‘Sutnja’) premiered in Croatia just days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In a moving gesture of support to their Ukrainian friends and colleagues, the production team put out a message of support prior to the opening episode. And the second season, which was shot whilst the war was going on, continued to feature Ukrainian actors and crew – despite the Ukrainian production company jointly responsible for the first season no longer existing.
The opening scene of S1 reveals an elderly man riding his bicycle early one morning along the bank of the River Drava in the city of Osijek in Croatia, near the Serbian border. He spots something floating in the water, and soon realises that it’s a body of a teenage girl. He calls the authorities and is quickly targeted by one officer as the likely culprit, rather than an innocent bystander.
That officer is Inspektor Vladimir Kovac (Darko Milas), a troubled detective with personal issues of his own. He’s under political pressure from above to get a quick and easy result, so an elderly passer-by is seemingly an easy target, regardless of the little matter of his guilt or innocence.
The Kovac backstory is just one of three main threads of the storyline. The second revolves around journalist Stribor (Goran Bogdan) who is a part-time writer for a local newspaper. He is keen to find out more about the dead girl in the river, so starts to investigate on his own. When he visits the site of her death to get some photographs of the scene, he hears a phone ringing and discovers a discarded mobile that was owned by the victim.
The third thread of the story is about Olga (Kseniya Mishina), a beautiful Ukrainian humanitarian who is married to a Croatian businessman, Ivan Hrvatic (Leon Lucev). She is hosting an extravagant gala in Kyiv to raise financial support for her charity to build children’s home for young victims of abuse. But whilst at the gala, she receives a call saying that her teenage niece has gone missing.
As other bodies start turning up dead in Osijek, the three main characters are drawn together in a collective effort to find the perpetrator before they commit further crimes and spread more misery.
This is a real find from Walter Presents. It’s based on a series of true events popularised in books written by highly respected Osijek journalist, Drago Hedl, and I’m sure that helps with the characterization. Okay, so the grumpy cop (Vladimir), ambitious journalist (Stribor) and beauty with a heart of gold (Olga) aren’t exactly a break from the stereotypical norm; but the acting is good and the storyline about the trafficking of young woman and weapons is depressingly believable.
Walter Presents: ‘The Silence’ seasons 1 and 2 are available as boxsets on C4 Streaming now.
