Silent Men Film review: Time to Talk

A personal investigation by filmmaker Duncan Cowles, Silent Men puts masculinity and its emotional stoicism under the spotlight.

Masculinity is under a spotlight following Donald Trump’s victory in this year’s American presidential election, with gender playing a significant role in voters’ motivations. But Silent Men strips away all the politics and all the noise around being a man by taking place in living rooms and kitchens instead of online or in the streets. Cowles interviews friends, family, and men who responded to his advert ‘looking for blokes’ to speak in his documentary, with his interviewees vulnerably placed in front of the camera while he hides behind his equipment. He stutters between long pauses when explaining the film’s thesis to his mum, as if considering his own feelings ought to elicit shyness or shame. On occasion, one of his subjects will ask a question in return, and there is a sense the shield of his filming equipment was supposed to protect him from being pulled into the emotional space created by his interviewees. 

There is a popular meme in which it is joked men would rather do any number of absurd things instead of going to therapy, and Cowles would likely crack a similar gag about Silent Men. That he has created an entire documentary feature film in order to let his guard down is inherently worthy of consideration. Does recording his attempts at affection and intimacy, turning them into a kind of performance, make them less sincere? Is his emotional development only of value if it is captured for others to see? One of Silent Men’s most profoundly real moments is a spontaneous hug initiated by Cowles’ dad, which happens off-camera because none were rolling at the time. It feels more significant because it wasn’t in aid of the documentary’s arc, but because a father simply wanted to hug his son, despite both of them struggling to show affection. 

Heavy sections of the film, including conversations about losing one’s family and suicide, are punctuated by moments of levity, such as when Cowles returns from a three-day men’s retreat and heads straight for the bath to wash the experience off him. He describes the retreat as simultaneously a powerful experience and an absolute nightmare. His awkwardness makes for pleasant company and his dry humour is a useful disarming tool in his deeply revealing interactions with his interviewees. He returns to visit John, who has experienced real hardship, over a number of years, and whose development is more starkly evident than Cowles’. John never told his family about a tumour on his spine, and when Cowles sees him a year and a half later, he maintains he doesn’t need anyone’s help, despite the dissolution of his marriage, the loss of his job, and his still precarious health. But Cowles keeps visiting, and John’s life keeps on moving in unexpected ways. 

Silent Men builds to a climactic conversation with Cowles’ fiancée, Mairi, who is deliberately absent from the rest of the film. More than anyone else, she is able to assess Cowles, analyse his motives, and see he still has some way to go. It’s this little segment that distills a massive topic – men, en masse, withholding their emotions – and brings it back to a single relationship between two people who are on each other’s side. It takes years of candid conversations with men he had never met before this project for Cowles to have this chat with his partner, accentuating the scale of what Cowles feels he has to overcome. The interviews and the documentary’s years-long production are ways for him to communicate with us in the audience while putting off what he wants to say to his mum and dad, who he really longs to connect with, even if connecting with us is easier. 

Cowles is told by Ainslie, a friend, he could spend years filming Silent Men and see all his interviewees change, while never facing up to whatever it is he’s looking for. The real challenge, according to Ainslie, is ‘to express something real with someone’, which he says neither of them are doing. But Cowles’ film is a triumph precisely because it expresses something real about men’s relationship with their own interiority and how it manifests outwardly. If Silent Men is a work of artifice in which those on screen are performing authenticity of a sort, it would nevertheless remain artistically sincere and convey a truth about the emotional distance men place between themselves and the rest of the world. 

In a touching voiceover, Cowles worries about running out of time with his parents before he learns to say he loves them. After screening his film at a festival, Cowles was approached by an audience member who told him he’d never said ‘I love you’ to his dad. Cowles watched him take out his phone, call his dad, and say it. He might not have the answers to masculinity’s pitfalls at large, or even to his own personal difficulties at overcoming his stoicism, but he and his film are here to say the answers are worth looking for, and those emotional barriers don’t have to keep men in place forever.

Silent Men will be released in UK cinemas from 19th November, 2024.