By Terry Sherwood
Eduardo Casanova Silencio is a charming and horrifying stiry of a vampiric triptych that flits across centuries with the poise of a ballerina and the bite of a kitten with claws. The film chronicles four vampire sisters across three eras of human terror: the Black Death, the AIDS crisis of 1989 Spain, and a fragile future in 2030.
It’s a film painted with venom, balancing cruelty and tenderness the way a vampire balances hunger with diminishing humans not tainted loneliness and fear of discovery. It’s visually bold and emotionally daring, morally confrontational, and, yes, occasionally heavy-handed with its messaging and one of the most sexual vampire films I have seen and refreshingly so Even some odd placed, yet appropriate musical numbers add the carnival of death atmosphere.
Silencio begins the 1300s, where Europe reeks of death and fear—a world where the vampire sisters’ real enemy isn’t the plague, but the “silence” surrounding their existence and the moral uncertainty of feeding during catastrophe. The sisters weigh their options such as starvation, predation, responsibility. These undead are elegant creatures trying to negotiate ethics in a world where ethics have rotted away. It feels like Hammer horror with some inspiration from the Vampire -The Masquerade book and game franchise .
Move 1989, the city of Madrid becoming more like the Paris in Henry Miller’s novel Under the Roofs of Paris. The city is filled low life’s, lonely people with heroin and repressed sexuality. Here you have a young female vampire’s romance with a drug-addicted female human who tests positive for HIV. This middle act is seductive, sorrowful, and deliberately confrontational. It’s also the segment where Silencio gets a bit on-the-nose with its AIDS, leaning so hard on allegory that you sometimes feel the weight works, because the emotions ring true. Love and Loneliness become a contagion of its own, dangerous and irresistible.
The final segment, set in 2030, is the most tender. A vampire/human couple quietly contemplates a medical breakthrough that reshapes society’s fears, opening the door to what could’ve been and what still might be. It’s sweet without being sentimental, sharp without being cruel, a soft landing after centuries of noise.
Silencio bathes every era in pastel hues, sickly pinks, blues, fabrics that look stolen from couture nightmares and some apartments seen in Italian Neo Realism. Gothic meets candy-coated colors recalling Federico Fellini and where vampire tales meet fever-dream fairy tale. It’s a world were death wears silk gloves and grief sips tea from porcelain skulls. The actors all give it hell in some explosive dialogue confrontations and outlets some exposing deep literal loneliness of the soul. Literally strip off your clothes and get high for we have nothing to lose.
But beneath the all the colors and the sometimes-rapid subtitled dialogue is the film’s unapologetic sexuality. Some viewers will find that erotic charge confronting, maybe even unnerving, but the film wields it deliberately. This isn’t exploitation; it’s exposition. Desire exposes vulnerability. Hunger reveals truth. And in each era, sexuality becomes both weapon and wound. Even a painful moment when a young vampire who is in love and wants to be human tries to remove her fangs only to have them instantly grow back
Silencio speaks fluently about grief, queer identity, generational trauma, and the suffocating pressures placed on the “other,” whether mortal or immortal. The work threads pain and humour together the bleak jokes of the dying, emotional outbursts, maniacal laughs and closeups of passionate kissing where vampire fangs only add to the danger.
The sisters’ bond and mother to daughter, lover to beloved, blood to blood—is the emotional core. They endure plagues, condemnation, famine, social erasure. Their immortality doesn’t shield them from loss; it damns them to witness it again and again. And yet, they persist. They adapt. They love. There’s something beautifully rebellious about that. They even smoke in the coffins, drink tea and listen to parents, yell when one is late demanding to know why.
Silencio isn’t afraid to be abrasive, flamboyant, or emotionally messy. Its aesthetic flirts constantly with absurdity, but its sincerity holds the centre. The film has much in common with the work of Emiliano Rocha Minter and the picture We Are the Flesh.’ High emotion, odd situations, rampant sexuality all in a setting of doom. At times Silencio overplays its metaphors, at times it indulges in provocation for not provocation’s sake be to put the decadent back into vampire lore without being overtly pornographic. Bloody brilliant no pun intended.
Silencio screened as part of Soho Horror Fest 2025.
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