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“Silent Fall” is the kind of thriller that not only requires a certain logic in its twists and turns but also in its view of Autism, which figures heavily here in the solving of a murder. It’s a tricky balancing act and we watch the Bruce Beresford-directed thriller hoping it doesn’t go careening away into ludicrousness. It would be quite something if it didn’t. But it certainly does.


Richard Dreyfuss plays retired psychologist Jake Reiner, brought into a murder scene where a mother and father have been brutally killed. What’s of interest to Jake is the autistic young son Tim (Ben Faulkner). Non-verbal and over-agitated, he’s first seen swinging a knife around while his older sister Sylvie (Liv Tyler, in her film debut) hides in a closet.


Reiner has a backstory, one of a youth group home for autistics that he used to run before a patient of his committed suicide. He is reluctant to begin work again with autistics but Sylvie believes that Tim is the only one who is able to shed light on the crime, if only Reiner can get through Tim’s many tics, tantrums, and locked-in nature.


The thing about autism is that “nobody can say for sure what it is”. Reiner says this and right away it makes him seem fairly authentic in being a studier of it. It’s a strange neurodevelopmental disorder, one in which all that’s known for sure are the symptoms- such as sequencing and mimicry- which makes Tim fairly fascinating.


And Dreyfuss gives a wonderful performance here, his dogged persistence in getting through to Tim is only as good as his genial, sensitive portrayal as a doctor trying to get through to a suffering child.
Their scenes together is almost enough to compensate for a horribly drawn aspect to their relationship- that Tim has no authentic voice of his own but can mimic the voice of others in near perfect tone and impression. In this Beresford dubs (horribly) other people’s voices over Timmy’s, and we’re supposed to believe he’s the one talking.


As Tim is put into severely dangerous, and in some cases, demented situations in the hopes these situations will jar something loose from his head, it’s also clear that the film is using autism as a gimmick. John Lithgow, playing another more authoritarian psychologist, plays up his role psychotically for no reason.


Also here for no reason is Linda Hamilton, playing Dreyfuss’ wife but given almost nothing to do. Dreyfuss actually has way more scenes with Tyler, who has never looked more pretty than here, but her range is limited and a late stage development where it turns out she wants to seduce Reiner is so out of left field it’s funny.


The biggest problem is it’s pretty easy to identify the killer come the mid-way point. For all the twists and revelations, the pool of actual suspects remains relatively small. And once we do get to the ending, the result is more sordid and icky, than exciting.


“Silent Fall” begins promisingly enough, and Dreyfuss is so good in it, yet it can’t overcome the laughably bad turn the script by Akiva Goldsman takes at the mid-way point. Had he kept more of the focus on the doctor trying to figure out his complex younger patient, this could have been more than the failure it wound up being.