The Silence

The Silence is a 2010 German thriller film directed by Baran bo Odar, after the German crime fiction novel The Silence by Jan Costin Wagner. Plot Summer 1986: Pia, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, is raped and murdered in a wheat field near a small provincial German town by one man while another man watches silently from the passenger seat of his red car. The murderer packs Pia's body into the trunk of the car and leaves her bicycle behind. In 2009, exactly 23 years later, 13-year-old Sinikka Weghamm goes missing from the local fair. Her bicycle is discovered in the same spot where Pia's bike had been found. Senior detective Krischan Mittich, who investigated the original murder, has just retired. The new murder investigation is undertaken by David Jahn, a detective who is still emotionally overwhelmed by the death of his wife five months earlier. Mittich takes an interest in the new case, but he is blocked from participating by the new senior detective, Matthias Grimmer, who insists on doing things his way, even when he is wrong.