Silent Night is fundamentally bleak enough to fit it’s ambition but simultaneously isn’t funny or clever enough to endeavour anybody’s full attention. 

There’s nothing here that feels shocking or austere, although it is a film with severely austere mannerisms. Silent Night is a blandly told and severely disheveled attempt at telling a desolate British crime story, with characters that don’t feel intact and storytelling which is no where near as clever as it intends to be. There’s something about this being wrapped around Christmas that made me slightly intrigued, but the holiday aspect of the film is really just an adumbration as the stale plot is abstracted by it’s own stilted reminiscence and gags. 

The performances are solid, I quite like Joel Fry as an actor and it was interesting to see him in this role. In regards to filmmaking, it’s the usual slightly superficial but fully toned down and bleak style of filmmaking which doesn’t really work here with the two-edged sword style of characterisation within the presentation of the protagonist. The script is dire and not particularly funny (when it’s trying to be), the twists are badly integrated into the script, mainly because the writing makes the ending almost impossible to find shocking. It also has about 3 separate endings which again, are just badly timed and provides evidence that the filmmakers were probably quite indecisive with what to do with the story here.