Silent Panic is a 2019 drama about three friends who get a nasty surprise while coming back from a camping trip, but can’t decide what to do about it.
The hook at the start of writer and director Kyle Schadt‘s independent release Silent Panic is a good one. A very good one. It poses all the right questions in setting up what should be a real puzzler, having us wonder about the whats and whys of a very troubling discovery. However, this is not what it seems to be, abandoning the usual suspense that comes naturally packed into such a thing for a more subdued personal melodrama that leaves this sort of feeling wedged into the wrong genre.
Three best friends, Eagle (Sean Nateghi), Bobby (Joseph Martinez), and Dominic (Jay Habre) are enjoying the last night on their camping trip in the hills outside of town. They’re close and we soon learn that Eagle is just out of jail, serving a year in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The next morning, they trek back to the car only to find, of all things, a dead woman in the truck. It’s shocking to say the least and while Dominic and Bobby think it might be best to call for help, Eagle is naturally skeptical he’ll be believed by the police. He convinces his friends to leave the woman in the car and drive back to town with half a plan, but that of course becomes a very, very bad idea.
A movie like this is designed around the question: What would I do? I’ll admit, that’s where I was for the first ten minutes and it’s where I wanted to stay as well, but Schadt has other ideas, keeping the body in the truck as a kind of MacGuffin, where it hides like the victim in Edgar Allen Poe‘s The Tell-Tale Heart. Unfortunately, despite Schadt’s valiant schemes to make this a psychological breakdown among these three friends, things don’t hold up, the motivations for why Eagle does as he does not really as convincing as it should be and the actions of his friends artificial at best.
More so, the story grows wider cracks the more it goes along, and while it’s commendable that Schadt tries to steer away from the conventional one, two, threes of this kind of mystery, he clutters up his plate with too much in the peripheral. He wants to build suspense with whether or not the body will be found, but these bits are padded out to exhausting lengths and we end up an hour into the movie at a place we should have been fifteen minutes in. Add to this long stretches of dialogue and conversation that have no weight on the plot and by the time a more clear game of cat and mouse plays out, we’ve already begun to lose interest.
That all said, I get what Schadt is doing, trying to give these three guys some ground to stand on before consumed by the spiral, and I further understand that the body is only a catalyst for the consequences of poor decisions. But the film is nearly inert, with almost no momentum. Movies like this breed on friends becoming enemies, yet there’s little in getting behind what they do, especially to each other. The body in the truck does have a small part to play in this, and it has some impact, but as a plot device in getting these people to their fates, feels false. More so when some questions get answered in the end.
Either way, Schadt does better as director than writer, with a few good moments that give Silent Panic some style. However, this is loosely put together, that hook at the start ending up not being about the mystery it feels ready to be.