A Place Called Silence is a Chinese crime thriller that attempts to present itself as an art film but never really meets the mark. The film tells the story of a young girl named Tong who goes to a girl’s high school and is severely bullied there. Tong’s mother works at the same school as a cleaner, and somehow it doesn’t seem to make a big difference, because the bullying is brutal. At the beginning of the film, Tong is glued to a wall with some sort of gooey substance by her classmates, and her mom has to cut her hair off to get rid of it. This isn’t just bullying; it’s violence beyond your imagination. Soon after, 3 of the bullies head off to an abandoned place near the school, and the next day they go missing. Only they aren’t missing; they’re actually dead, so while the police are struggling to find these girls, we’re stuck wondering if it was Tong’s mom who killed them. This movie tries really hard to be metaphoric, non-linear, and super stylistic, but none of these ideas come through because, at the end of the day, the abuse and violence are the only things that truly stand out, and it’s absolutely unbearable. Anyway, with that said, I’m going to try and make some sense of this movie and figure out what happens at the end of A Place Called Silence.
Spoiler Alert
Who is Lin Zaifu?
The film is set in 2006, one year after a devastating tsunami, but I feel like this tsunami doesn’t actually have anything to add to the plot; it’s simply there to confuse us about what’s important here. The roof of the school hall might be leaking because of the effect of the tsunami, but it’s more important because the one skylight on top broke a little while ago. Tong, who lives alone with her mother and has a stepfather who has been away for a while, used to have a friend named Huijun. Tong is mute and Huijun is neurodivergent, so they become the perfect target for the popular kids in school, i.e., the headmaster’s daughter and her friends. On Huijun’s birthday, when Tong’s not around, the girls bully Huijun to death, quite literally. They force her to drink water with shocks of her hair in it and place a thorny rose crown on her head until she bleeds. Tong and Huijun had a wounded dove they’d rescued some time ago; the girls then threatened to hurt the dove if Huijun didn’t stand on top of the skylight. She struggles to do it because it’s of course dangerous and scary; however, the girls force her by pushing her on there until, in the last moment, she ends up crashing through the glass and into the hall.
At the beginning of the film, it feels like Tong’s mom, Li Han, wants revenge and kills the three girls for what they did to her daughter. However, somewhere down the line, Tong sees a man wearing a similar raincoat as her mom’s, and it scares her. For the first half of the film, we’re made to believe that a man named Lin, who is a handyman at the school, is just a strange man who looks at the girls all weirdly. In actuality, this man is Lin Zaifu, Huijun’s father, and he’s the one who wants revenge for his daughter’s death.
How Does Li Han Find The Other Girls?
A little while later, Tong too goes missing, and this feels like a misstep because she wasn’t one of the bullies; she was bullied, so why is she getting kidnapped? This is something that gets tied up right at the end of the film, but we’ll get there in just a bit. From the moment Tong goes missing, Li Han is on a mission to find her. Just a little while earlier, Lin Zaifu had moved into the same building as her, and she noticed evidence near his apartment of her daughter being dragged into the house. It seems she’s like a detective, because the whole scene plays out in her head perfectly. I’m not really sure how or why. Li Han then tries to break into Lin’s house and even hurts her hand on a nail in the process. She nearly gets caught in there, but the landlady of the building distracts the guy and asks him to help her with some chores. She even asks him to give her a ride. By this time, Li Han’s made it out and goes to the store opposite the building. The police also arrive at the same time, and Li Han and Detective Dai watch the footage together, noticing some black garbage bags in Lin’s hands. This is when a garbage truck shows up in front of their building, and Li Han runs towards it to check if there’s body parts in any of them. There isn’t, and she’s made a mess, but then she sees a man in the same black raincoat and runs after him. This man isn’t Lin but a boy, Dai’s runaway son himself (I know it’s a bit much).
Now they all go to the station, where Dai beats up his son because he’s a pervert, and he ran away because his dad beat him up years ago for taking videos of his cousin (a little girl) and aunt (yikes). I suppose here we’re meant not to judge the kid as a pervert but see him as someone who needs help because he has important evidence on his camera regarding Lin and Tong. See, Dai’s son’s been taking videos of Tong for a while, and while he does have evidence of Lin kidnapping Tong, he also has videos of Li Han abusing Tong. He claims he’s protecting her before sharing the videos with his dad. Apparently this is why he never called the police when she was kidnapped (it doesn’t really make sense, but I guess the kid really just needs some help). There are videos of Li Han beating Tong with a stick and a whip, and it looks bad for her. But a man from the same charity as Lin is called in for questioning at the station, and she sees that he’s got the same key as him and asks about it. This key is for the recreation room at the charity foundation where Lin works, but it’s not been used because it was damaged during the tsunami and they haven’t been able to restore it (I guess it did have a purpose). Li Han secretly escapes the station and heads to the foundation, behind which she finds the bodies of the 3 missing girls. Oh, and the headmaster’s daughter met her fate too; only she was hung out to display during a big school event a couple of days after the other girls went missing.
Why Does Lin Read Out Of Awaken?
In school, Mr. Fang teaches the girls a few lines from a book called “Awaken.” It was when he was making them repeat after him the words “Actions rooted in good and evil bring about their own consequences,” that Huijun fell through the roof. Lin gets stuck on this sentence, because he also kidnaps Mr. Fang later, asking him why he lied about Huijun committing suicide. I guess what we’re supposed to make out of this is that good and evil actions will have their natural outcomes, either positive or negative, but when both good and evil end, a new life begins. I guess Lin simply wants to fulfill this idea—the beginning of a new life—because Huijun, i.e., the good, has already gone, so it was only fair for him to get rid of evil, whatever it took from him.
What Does the Dove Signify?
We know what happened with the wounded dove and how Tong and Huijun tried to nurse it back to health. Tong also sees a massive dove in the school before she disappears. Of course, it’s in her head, but I guess the dove signifies freedom and peace. All she’s looking for is to get out of here and be free for good, and she seeks help from somebody unexpected for this. No, it’s not her mother, because she’s also trying to run away from her.
What Happened to Tong?
So, remember how we thought Tong was kidnapped? Well, in fact, she wasn’t kidnapped; she planned it all. When Huijun was being bullied, Tong had shown up on the roof. She was ready to hurt the bullies with a pair of scissors, but her mom found her right at that moment and stopped her. Instead of helping Huijun, Li Han dragged Tong away, saying there was nothing they could do because there was a camera on the roof. But then, by the time she told her daughter she’d go help the girl, it was already too late, and Huijun fell through the skylight. Tong definitely blames her mother for not being able to save the only friend she ever had, but this is only one factor behind why she wants to leave home. There’s actually one massive secret Tong and her mother have been keeping for a few years now. The stepdad isn’t actually away; he’s dead and under the kumquat garden on the roof of the building. Tong actually leaves hints of this in many places because she’s supposed to keep it a secret, but it all comes together at the end of the film.
Then the movie adds another twist to the tale: did Li Han not kill her husband? In a flashback, we saw that Li Han was abused by her husband, and he locked her out of the house and even threw the keys out, and nobody helped her at the time. However, before that happened, she’d looked into the bathroom, where water was running, but we didn’t get to see what was behind the door. Now we learn that at the time a really young Tong was assaulted by her stepdad and was standing there crying and bleeding. This is why the man threw Li Han out, because he was not done with the poor girl, but the kid had picked up a pair of scissors at that time and stabbed him in the neck as soon as he tried to touch her again. Remember Dai’s son? He has evidence that Tong killed her stepfather too.
During A Place Called Silence’s ending, there’s a massive chase between Li Han and Lin. She’s desperate to have her daughter back, and they really hurt each other physically. But eventually, the police find them, and Lin leads them to the roof of the building where the stepdad was buried and then jumps off the roof, becoming free like his daughter and joining her—a new beginning, you know? A little later, Dai visits Li Han in the hospital and shows her the video of Tong killing her stepdad. He asks her why she didn’t go to the police at the time, and all Li Han can say is that Tong was a little girl and she was bleeding, and she wanted to protect her. This is also why she beat her up, because apparently, only she could ever be that harsh towards her, nobody else. I guess in a way she feels responsible for what the man did and for leaving her daughter alone even though she didn’t know he’d come back a day early. It’s not the best excuse for abusing your child, but at the end of the day, her reasoning for everything is that “she’s a mother.” Dai feels sympathetic towards her because, in a way, it parallels his own story and how he feels somewhat guilty for not helping his own son. So he destroys the evidence. At the same time, we see that Tong has left the city safely in a truck that Lin had put her on by hiding her in a box. You’d think this is where the movie ends, but it’s not, because then follows a montage of the events in chronological order. I guess to make it really clear that it was Tong who made sure Lin knew that Huijun was bullied and didn’t kill herself.
What Happens in the Post Credit Scene?
Somehow, there’s more to A Place Called Silence, and in the post-credit scene, Tong is in a detention center for girls, which means she might’ve turned herself in for killing her stepdad. Maybe this is to imply that she was always good, and despite everything that happened to her, she remained a good person.
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