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The Geometry of Quiet
There is a particular kind of discomfort that sets in about twenty minutes into Mathis Decroux’s *L’Appel du silence*. It’s a physical sensation, really. You’re sitting in the theater, the house lights are down, and you suddenly become agonizingly aware of the person in the row behind you shifting in their seat. You hear the crinkle of a candy wrapper three rows up like a gunshot. You hear your own breath. That’s when it hits you: Decroux hasn’t just made a film about the reclusive monks of the Chartreuse mountains; he’s made a film that weaponizes the absence of sound against his audience.
Decroux has always been an observational filmmaker, but he’s never been this austere. His previous work, *Le Vent Invisible*, flirted with the idea of landscape as a character, but here, he pushes it to the brink of abstraction. He isn’t interested in the logistics of monastic life. You won’t find a narrator explaining their daily schedule or why they chose this life. Instead, the camera acts like a patient, unblinking eye. It lingers on the way light crawls across a stone floor for so long that you start to perceive the rotation of the earth, or at least, you start to feel like you might.
It’s easy to dismiss this as "slow cinema" for the sake of being difficult. I admit, there were moments—somewhere around the forty-minute mark, when the screen was filled with nothing but the slow dripping of a tap into a metal bucket—where I felt my patience fraying. I wanted a cut. I wanted a close-up of a face, a line of dialogue, a hint of narrative momentum. But that frustration is the point. Decroux is forcing us to recalibrate our internal metronomes. We’ve become so addicted to information, to the quick-cut syntax of modern streaming, that silence now feels like a glitch in the system.
Look at the way he films Brother Thomas, the oldest of the group. We never get a traditional "talking head" interview. We just watch him scrub the floor of the refectory. The camera doesn't pan or tilt; it just holds steady, forcing us to watch the repetition of the action. You see the muscles in his forearms twitch, the way his shoulder blades shift under his heavy woolen tunic, the slight tremor in his hand as he wrings out the cloth. It’s an incredibly intimate way to know a person. You don’t need to know his childhood or his regrets; you know him because you’ve watched him work for three minutes without interruption.
As *The Guardian’s* Peter Bradshaw noted in his review, Decroux is “less interested in the religious life than in the sheer, tactile resistance of the material world.” It’s a sharp observation. The film feels less like a documentary and more like a meditative exercise in looking at things until they reveal something else. There’s a scene where the brothers are eating a meal. There’s no clatter of silverware, no chatter. Just the sound of chewing and the faint whistling of wind against the heavy wooden shutters. It’s almost claustrophobic, but it also feels strangely honest. It’s the sound of a human life stripped of performance.
Whether this film truly works or whether it's an act of high-minded vanity depends entirely on what you bring into the theater with you. If you go in looking for a traditional documentary, you’ll likely find it empty—a hollow vessel of pretty shots. But if you let yourself sink into it, if you stop waiting for the story to "start," something shifts. You start noticing the nuances of the lighting, the way the colors desaturate as the sun sets, the way the rhythm of the film mirrors the rhythm of the breathing in the room.
It’s a demanding experience. I’m not sure I’d want to watch it twice, and I’m definitely not sure it’s a "good" movie in any traditional sense. But it’s a film that stays with you, not because of what it shows, but because of what it demands you sit through. It’s an invitation to shut up and watch. And honestly? In this particular moment of my life, that felt less like a chore and more like a necessary reset.
There is a particular kind of discomfort that sets in about twenty minutes into Mathis Decroux’s *L’Appel du silence*. It’s a physical sensation, really. You’re sitting in the theater, the house lights are down, and you suddenly become agonizingly aware of the person in the row behind you shifting in their seat. You hear the crinkle of a candy wrapper three rows up like a gunshot. You hear your own breath. That’s when it hits you: Decroux hasn’t just made a film about the reclusive monks of the Chartreuse mountains; he’s made a film that weaponizes the absence of sound against his audience.
Decroux has always been an observational filmmaker, but he’s never been this austere. His previous work, *Le Vent Invisible*, flirted with the idea of landscape as a character, but here, he pushes it to the brink of abstraction. He isn’t interested in the logistics of monastic life. You won’t find a narrator explaining their daily schedule or why they chose this life. Instead, the camera acts like a patient, unblinking eye. It lingers on the way light crawls across a stone floor for so long that you start to perceive the rotation of the earth, or at least, you start to feel like you might.
It’s easy to dismiss this as "slow cinema" for the sake of being difficult. I admit, there were moments—somewhere around the forty-minute mark, when the screen was filled with nothing but the slow dripping of a tap into a metal bucket—where I felt my patience fraying. I wanted a cut. I wanted a close-up of a face, a line of dialogue, a hint of narrative momentum. But that frustration is the point. Decroux is forcing us to recalibrate our internal metronomes. We’ve become so addicted to information, to the quick-cut syntax of modern streaming, that silence now feels like a glitch in the system.
Look at the way he films Brother Thomas, the oldest of the group. We never get a traditional "talking head" interview. We just watch him scrub the floor of the refectory. The camera doesn't pan or tilt; it just holds steady, forcing us to watch the repetition of the action. You see the muscles in his forearms twitch, the way his shoulder blades shift under his heavy woolen tunic, the slight tremor in his hand as he wrings out the cloth. It’s an incredibly intimate way to know a person. You don’t need to know his childhood or his regrets; you know him because you’ve watched him work for three minutes without interruption.
As *The Guardian’s* Peter Bradshaw noted in his review, Decroux is “less interested in the religious life than in the sheer, tactile resistance of the material world.” It’s a sharp observation. The film feels less like a documentary and more like a meditative exercise in looking at things until they reveal something else. There’s a scene where the brothers are eating a meal. There’s no clatter of silverware, no chatter. Just the sound of chewing and the faint whistling of wind against the heavy wooden shutters. It’s almost claustrophobic, but it also feels strangely honest. It’s the sound of a human life stripped of performance.
Whether this film truly works or whether it's an act of high-minded vanity depends entirely on what you bring into the theater with you. If you go in looking for a traditional documentary, you’ll likely find it empty—a hollow vessel of pretty shots. But if you let yourself sink into it, if you stop waiting for the story to "start," something shifts. You start noticing the nuances of the lighting, the way the colors desaturate as the sun sets, the way the rhythm of the film mirrors the rhythm of the breathing in the room.
It’s a demanding experience. I’m not sure I’d want to watch it twice, and I’m definitely not sure it’s a "good" movie in any traditional sense. But it’s a film that stays with you, not because of what it shows, but because of what it demands you sit through. It’s an invitation to shut up and watch. And honestly? In this particular moment of my life, that felt less like a chore and more like a necessary reset.