Early on in Silent Road, one investigator notes that there has never been a successful kidnapping for ransom in the entire history of modern Greece. Considering this new crime thriller centres on the kidnapping of not one but nine children, their whole school bus disappearing from the road one fine morning, its obvious that somebody thinks they’re going to be the first. But whodunnit is only one of the mysteries in play here.
Silent Road ostensibly takes its inspiration from the German legend of , the ratcatcher who, stiffed on the bill by cheap townsfolk, was said to have lured away their children in revenge. Here, the children are the scions of various wealthy and influential residents of an affluent Athens suburb. We meet the actual kidnappers quite quickly, the practical issues of housing and feeding nine children, plus their bus driver and teacher, forming part of the drama. But as to who has masterminded the plot and what their motives are? For that, we need to keep on watching.
Silent Road episode 1 Credit: EVANGELOS_GKIKOPOULOS
The police, led by detective Nasos Oikonomidis (Dimitris Lalos), quickly leap into action, but things take an unexpected turn when the kidnappers contact Thalia Karouzou (Penelope Tsilika) to begin negotiating a ransom.
An unemployed journalist and a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, Thalia is tangentially connected to the case – she’s the aunt of two of the missing children. She’s also something of a black sheep in her family, thanks to nodding off and almost letting one of her niblings drown in the family pool back in the day. As the investigation begins to centre on her as the authorities’ only point of contact with the perpetrators, we’re forced to wonder why she was chosen, and what her connection to the actual mastermind is.
Silent Road - episode 4 Credit: EVANGELOS_GKIKOPOULOS
Stylishly mounted and dripping in uneasy atmosphere, Silent Road gives up its secrets slowly and carefully, maintaining the tension across its 13 episodes. For some it may be almost unbearably tense; the loss of a child to abduction is one of the most primal fears imaginable, and real-world cases attract massive media attention for just that reason.
This gets reflected in our fictional media, too; the 1985 Australian film Fortress, directed by genre veteran Arch Nicholson, is based on the 1980 novel of the same name by Gabrielle Lord, and both took their inspiration from , when armed men seized six students and their teacher from a rural one-room school to hold for ransom. Fortress uses the actual events as the springboard for a kind of Lord of the Flies narrative, teacher Sally Jones (Rachel Ward) and her charges going quite feral as they fight back against and eventually murder their captors.
Silent Road - episode 2 Credit: EVANGELOS_GKIKOPOULOS
Silent Road doesn’t go down that path, instead circling around the possibility that the kidnapping is not so much for profit or even revenge but rather revolution, of a sort. These are the children of the monied elite, and they’ve been taken by someone with an axe to grind like an unwary Eloi seized by voracious Morlocks – a comparison directly made in Ron Howard’s 1996 film, Ransom, come to think of it. Kidnapping-as-class-warfare has a nasty edge to it, but it’s a very compelling notion, and Silent Road uses the abduction as a way to bring us into the world of these wealthy families, exposing not just their vulnerability but their hypocrisy. The result is a tense, gripping mystery – but don’t be surprised if your sympathies lean toward the nominal villains on this one.
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Silent Road - season 1 episode 1
