Every year the Palm Dog Award is handed out by the press in Cannes for the best canine performance at the veteran film festival and after the disaster barker Project Silence it needs an ensemble award!
In case you’re wondering what cloned killer mastiffs are doing in the arthouse spectacle par excellence: The South Korean blockbuster runs in the genre-affine Midnight Screenings, where in the past the zombie fairy tale Train to Busan shuddered the audience. Project Silence basically tells the same story, only with a bridge instead of a train and the four-legged friends trained to kill instead of zombies.
A bridge disaster rarely comes alone in the sci-fi disaster movie
Once again, a busy father’s parenting rights are put to the test by a catastrophe. Lee Sun-kyun (of Parasite and the Cannes horror Sleep), crisis manager for a presidential candidate, drives to the airport with his daughter one foggy evening. However, a tiktoker has other plans. For a live stream, he races across the 800-meter-long Incheon Bridge in his bright yellow sports car, triggering a pile-up.
Also on the bridge: A transport of top secret clone furry friendsthat are remotely controlled with chips in their heads. Code name: Project Silence. The push-button beast recovery goes awry, the bridge is in danger of collapsing and as if that wasn’t dangerous enough, the four-pawed soldiers suffer a malfunction. Suddenly all survivors are on their hit list.
Dexter Studios
Project Silence
First of all, director Kim Tae-gon and his team deserve praise. Firstly for having one Augment disaster movie about a collapsing bridge with Death Puppy (Roland Emmerich could never!). Second, for resisting the lure of a larger monster. The killer machines are intimidating, but apart from their near-zero body fat percentage, they differ only minimally from the off-leash pets you might find on any Berlin pedestrian zone on a Wednesday morning.
The narrowness of the setting is also refreshing. Phone calls lead to the outside world, but Project Silence’s outrageous disaster scenario plays out on a small section of the bridge. At night, the survivors sneak through wrecked cars, seek shelter in the hold of coaches and otherwise have to make do with what they have on site. No large-scale city destruction, no collapsing skyscrapers, just a few strangers, a pack of vengeful critters, the film is done.
Project Silence delivers what it promises
deRidiculously serious action-fun benefits from one of the most random casts in recent disaster film historyincluding said political buff, a prolific golfer and her caddy, a dodgy tow truck driver, and the insanely drifting animal lover who invented Project Silence.
Dexter Studios
Project Silence
Together, they constantly make new plans for the increasingly absurd challenges the script throws at them: mass collision, shaky bridge piers, hairy killing machines, and inaction from the authorities. Because a South Korean blockbuster wouldn’t be a South Korean blockbuster without the government’s negligent and/or malicious disaster management.
The callous action is staged with an all-pervasive expediency. As interchangeable as the film looks, the screenplay rushes to the next level of escalation. Project Silence lacks the will to style and socially critical bite of films like Train to Busan or Bong Joon-ho’s The Host. A few original, practical animal horror effects wouldn’t have hurt either. But ultimately, Project Silence delivers what it promises. Killer hounds are chasing humans on a collapsing bridge. Did Auguste and Louis Lumière dream of something like this 120 years ago?