Rent The Silence of Lorna (2008)

Another good film - The Silence of Lorna review by CP Customer

If you liked the Dardenne brothers other films such as Rosetta and L'enfant, no doubt you will like this.

Demanding but compelling European cinema.

European Cinema At It's Best - The Silence of Lorna review by CP Customer

This really is an excellent film which follows Lorna’s attempts to establish herself as a Belgium citizen whilst raising revenue for her own business project. The world of sham marriages and citizenship proves to be a profitable one but fraught with danger. Her own relationship with the reforming addict Claudy becomes complicated as she seeks to help him resist the temptation of drugs. After benefiting herself through such an arrangement she is immediately whisked into a new deal with a Russian, yet she finds it tough to move on. You really feel for Lorna who seems like a genuine, kind and caring woman with good intensions that soon manifest themselves as real reservations about what she is doing. Has her body become no different to that of a prostitute? Available to hire for fake marriages and convenient divorces soon after citizenship is granted?

An Eye-Opening Thriller - The Silence of Lorna review by NK

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*** A shocking insight into the activities of criminal gangs, when they combine their drugs-trade business with their people trafficking racket. A simple idea, but you'd have to be pretty evil to think of it - the addicts you sell drugs to are eventually bound to get heavily into your debt. The way out you offer them is if they marry a woman you're trafficking into the country - in this case from Albania - so that she can get Belgian citizenship. Of course, once your Lorna has her citizenship, the junkie husband is surplus to requirements and nobody will be surprised when he ODs, leaving Lorna free to remarry. A Russian "businessman" will pay a lot for a marriage of convenience to Lorna, which will in turn earn him EU/Belgian citizenship, but then of course he will want to have his own wife, so now Lorna becomes a liability. All this in a world where our failed war on drugs and our inept anti-immigration policies mean there will never be a shortage of the drug addicts and illegal immigrants that comprise the raw materials for this enterprise - in a parallel universe that exists cheek-to-cheek with ours, where the regular deaths of drug addicts and trafficked immigrants prompt nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders and occasional platitude from our moral guardians.