The most-watched lists of any major streaming service have proven on countless occasions, almost daily in fact, that quality is no barometer when it comes to subscribers deciding what to watch. Terrible movies, box office bombs and absolute disasters can always be found hovering in or around the Top 10, and we can now add 2019’s forgotten The Silencing to that list.
Game of Thrones veteran Nikolaj Coster-Waldau headlines the ensemble as the fantastically-named Rayburn Swanson, a reformed hunter who finds himself caught in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse when he partners up with a local sheriff to track down a killer who may have kidnapped his daughter five years earlier.
It’s a rote setup, but the cast is solid, with Malignant‘s Annabelle Wallis as the rookie law enforcement officer, with supporting roles for the ever-reliable Zahn McClarnon, and star of the After trilogy Hero Fiennes Tiffin. Unfortunately, The Silencing is fairly poor in execution and even more uninspired.
Critics only deemed it worthy of a 17% Rotten Tomatoes score, but that hasn’t stopped it from enjoying a most unexpected surge on streaming. As per FlixPatrol, The Silencing has rocketed by over 20 places on the viewership charts to rank as the seventh most popular title on HBO Max, so at least the film is finally finding the audience it wanted to seize when it was first shuffled onto VOD last summer.
