Bella is terrified of the death awaiting Alex if she doesn’t take her pill, so persuades her to spend their last five minutes dancing in the kitchen. Her partner Bella tries to get her to take her suicide pill but she vomits it up, and there are no spares. On one of the film’s publicity stills, everyone, including the children, are dressed up to the nines - except Art in his jeans.) By the end, Sophie is forced to accept the party line.Īlex has been asleep in a chair after too much champagne. (Art may be part of the family but he has the status of the outsider. The weak links are two of the outsiders: Sophie and Art, who question agreed decisions. Throughout the film, any deviation from the party line is slapped down (though whispers continue) their solid pact to take their pills in the same house is only solid when they all agree. As agreed previously, the family groups go off to their own rooms to die with their loved ones. Maybe outside Art received just the right amount to activate his immune system to fight against the bigger dose he’d receive from the big cloud when it arrived? Maybe he was somehow already immune? Maybe the cloud was losing toxicity as it rolled on? Maybe it targets the old rather than the young (where young = innocence)? Perhaps Art was right to question the scientists and the accuracy of their predictions? (I like to think of the teacher Art mentions in an anecdote, who had to apologise to a classmate for getting something wrong - perhaps he then got a job in government.) He has haemorraged, and looks dead, but isn’t. When she looks at Art, his head drops back and is revealed to be covered in blood.

His parents rush him back into the house, and Nell holds him on their bed as Simon dashes around trying to get cokes with the right level of coldness for the twins to take their pills. While it seems clear that the family succumbed to the pills not the cloud (they hadn’t haemorrhaged, once of the final signs before death) Art is exposed to the first tendrils of the killer cloud. There were suicide pill packets opened on the dashboard, but also the first wisps of toxic gas drifting around the car. Earlier, he ran off into the night and discovered a car with a family of four in it, all dead: mum, dad, baby and toddler. So why is Art still alive? First of all, he never took his suicide pill, because his mother Nell assumed he was already dead. He is literally left to deal with the complete mess of the older generations. The boy wakes up surrounded by his dead mum, dad and brothers. Only there is one (at least one) survivor: Art. This burden on the young is really brought home in the very last scene, when the camera rolls over beds of bodies in the big house, family snuggled together who all took their pills.

*a general we rather than a specific we, I would hope of my readers.

It might, though, get you a better death. Silent Night also examines privilege, how it helped get us here and how this issue is so big that eventually even wealth won’t save your life, unless you really are the super rich (or a pet owned by the super rich - the Queen is assumed to be in her bunker with her dog food). There’s an expectation that the young can sort everything out, tied up in the praise we lavish on them for their willingness to put action before words - while we* still, like Sandra and Nell, point out to them that it wasn’t really our fault. The focus is on Art, and a big part of writer-director Camille Griffin’s film is the burden we are leaving for the next generation. It’s just that (a) humans have a penchant for looking for patterns and connections with our real lives, and (b) by now one cataclysm starts to look very much like another in how we respond to it. ( My review is here.)ĭespite Silent Night‘s COVID similarities, this is about climate change. Venture in at your own risk, once you’ve paused to put out the recycling.

Before your eyes ending explained