one must immediately go and see the tribe: in a cinema, mind, not on tv or a laptop. the relentlessness of the film watched in the cinema setting is only part of it, but at the screening i was at something remarkable happened — by and by the silence on screen had taken a hold of the audience, and while in the early parts of the film there were the occasional chuckle or gasp by the second half a self-imposed code of silence had fallen on the audience. this insidious mirroring of the film became apparent to me the more traumatic the film became — no startled intakes of breaths, tiny half-screams, none of the mild noises of discomfort and anticipatory anxiety: the more gruesome the on-screen horror the more the silence deepened in the cinema, the way snow sinks the world into a more muffled tone. i found myself physically flinching and jerking away from the screen at particularly painful scenes, but silently swallowing back the ordinary, human sounds of distress and horror, my hand clasped over my mouth: to gasp aloud would have been more than a faux pas, that film world had taken us over.
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