Long suffering

Silence is Martin Scorsese’s film about Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan whose faith is sorely tested, just as your patience will be sorely tested too. There are moments of grandeur. The landscape is lush, and often mistily beautiful. The torture porn is spectacularly inventive. But its commercial compromises may drive you to distraction (the casting, the language choices), it is punishingly repetitive and, at nearly three hours, sooooooo, sooooooo long. My own patience was sorely tested to the point that I might have taken a little bit of a nap. If I did I never sensed I missed anything of note, but then it is that kind of film.

This is based on the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo who was, unusually, a Japanese Catholic, known as ‘the Japanese Graham Greene’. The novel fictionalises true historical events and the persecution of Christians in 17th-century Japan as a means of exploring cultural difference, the nature of belief, imperialism and what it costs to follow Jesus Christ when life isn’t going too well and you may be hung upside down over a pit with a nick in your neck — to bleed to death, slowly — for your trouble.