Silent Hours was originally a three-one hour episodic television series out of the UK in 2017, and I suspect it worked better in that format. It has now been edited down slightly (still over two and a half hour runtime) into a feature film. It’s a bit overlong, and slow paced, but does keep the audience guessing about the identity of the killer.

Former Royal Navy Commander John Duval (James Weber Brown), now a private investigator specializing in finding evidence of adultery does two things: he finds a lot of evidence of adultery (apparently there are a great deal of cheating spouses in his seaside town) and he convinces a number of women to have rough sex with him, often shortly after meeting him. A question that loomed throughout is why so many women were willing to jump into rough sex with this man, even the sister of one of the murder victims.

When three women connected to him are killed in one week, all found dismembered in bathtubs with a washcloth in their mouths and their heads between their legs, tub filled with water and blood, Duval becomes the prime suspect, especially since he has had sex with most if not all of them before they were killed. Either Duval is a slick serial killer, or someone is setting him up by murdering his partners. The film implies if he is the killer, he may not even be aware he is doing it. As is usually the case in this kind of thriller, the investigation uncovers the much bigger crimes behind the killings.

Silent Hours opens with a conversation between Duval and a therapist, Dr. Catherine Benson (Indira Varma), and the episodes of murder and investigation are punctuated by their sessions. Investigating the murders, and firmly believing Duval is the one behind them, is DI Jane Ambrose (Dervla Kirwan). It is an odd aspect that being a sex crime thriller, it focuses on women’s bodies, rough sex, and sexualizing the female characters and yet has strong female characters at its center, attempting to unravel the mystery of the sex killer. Varma and Kirwan give strong performances that elevate things.

The mystery works mostly, but Silent Hours has three problems. There are two possibilities at the heart of the mystery: either Duval is the killer, or he isn’t. Either answer works, but the film wants the audience to keep guessing, even after the mystery is ostensibly solved. The audience should be invested in that possibility and either really want it to be him, or really hope it isn’t him. Because we barely know the victims and because the film has not made us particularly empathetic towards Duval, it is hard to care either way. The second issue is the aforementioned pace. Not quite glacial, but the slow investigation of murders which works well in an episodic television series slows down the inevitable reveal. Combined with a lack of empathy, it can make the two and a half hours seem longer. Watching this felt like binge-watching a series.

Finally, Silent Hours betrays its television origins. The killer is a violent sadist, the detective likes rough sex, yet the audience is shown neither. We are told about it. We can see dismembered bodies in bathtubs, but surprisingly little actual violence is depicted for such a violent and bloody killer. Similarly the sex scenes are not particularly sexual or sexy, often rushed through to get to the after effect of the violence hours later. The overall effect is of an erotic thriller that, while well made and perhaps interesting in its original format, is neither particularly thrilling nor erotic.

5 out of 10