Brad Anderson is an underrated filmmaker. He's quietly put out some of the best thrillers of the century, including Sessio 9, The Machinist, TransSiberian, and Beirut. He's back with an excellent new action thriller, The Silent Hour, which follows a late deafened detective (Joel Kinnaman) when he finds himself trapped in an abandoned apartment high-rise with a deaf woman who is targeted by a murderous gang. It features Anderson's usual skill at suspense but takes it to even more interesting degrees with its incorporation of deafness into the film's aesthetic. After this, Anderson is hoping to finish a gestating project — the final film in George A. Romero's zombie franchise, Twilight of the Dead. He told MovieWeb in a recent interview:
"It's teed up. We're just looking for places. We're literally kind of in that phase of just locking in locations and stuff , so that will be great. That would be a totally different movie [from The Silent Hour ]. We're taking that movie, which George wrote the treatment for, and that the script was inspired by, and trying to do it in a way that's respectful to the Romero franchise and the whole universe he created ."
George Romero Planned a Final Movie for the Living Dead
More than 55 years ago, Romero began his groundbreaking sociopolitical horror project with 1968's Night of the Living Dead. The filmmaker essentially created the modern zombie in the cultural zeitgeist, and followed it with the all-time masterpiece Dawn of the Dead and the truly underrated and grisly Day of the Dead. He returned years later and churned out a divisive and often derided series of films that continued the franchise — Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead.
But the franchise wasn't over; Romero had a story treatment and part of a script for one final film, Twilight of the Dead, but died before he could complete it. Fortunately, a director like Brad Anderson is the perfect choice to bring it to fruition. "I'm hoping to do it imminently," said Anderson, who added:
"It's also meant to be a bit of a finale on that [franchise], in a way. It's meant to be a bit of a button, which is the way I guess that Romero sort of envisioned it . So yeah, it'd be great to be able to pull it off. We just want to do a zombie movie that's not like a typical zombie movie , just like [ the Silent Hour ] isn't a typical thriller. That's the kind of movies I like to make, ones that don't tread the genre line so perfectly. I like to sort of try out new things."
In the meantime, Anderson's new film with Joel Kinnaman, Sandra Mae Frank, and Mekhi Phifer, The Silent Hour, is available to rent or buy on demand or digital platforms. It's excellent.
