Review: Life on the farm in ‘Silo’ is quiet, perhaps too quiet

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The indie drama “Silo” is a short, muted study of modern farm life, following multiple generations of small-town folks over the course of one tense day. The movie is also at times a nightmarish thriller and a cautionary tale. But director Marshall Burnette (who also co-wrote “Silo” with Jason Williams) uses those elements more as a hook for his quiet character study.

That’s a defensible creative choice; but here it’s not always effective. Burnette handles the genre film and the art film pieces of “Silo” fairly well but shortchanges them both by not committing fully to either.

“Silo” features a very good cast of accomplished character actors and relative newcomers led by Jack DiFalco as Cody, a teenage asthmatic and aspiring heavy metal musician who works part-time harvesting grain and feed. One day Cody is inside a corn silo when its contents suddenly shift. The grain quickly swallows his supervisor and buries the boy up to his chest.

Burnette does a fine job of staging and filming the accident, using the natural light filtering into the silo and the golden glow of the corn to make this disaster look oddly beautiful. The sequence is also effectively nerve-racking, dramatizing the very real danger of grain entrapments.

The corn-collapse happens about 20 minutes into a movie that barely runs for over an hour (with a lot of that running time padded out by the closing credits). Much of the rest of the story involves the rescue process, which pits the farm’s sensitive boss Junior (Jim Parrack) against the cocky volunteer fireman Frank (Jeremy Holm). The two bicker about strategies for extracting Cody while his mom, Valerie (Jill Paice) frets outside.

During that rescue-prep, the characters hint around about their connections to each other and to some of the tragic stories in their community’s recent past. It’s clear Burnette and Williams have thought through who these people are, even if some of the finer details never make it to the screen.

The plot in “Silo” ultimately proves too thin, with not enough fleshing out of either the shared history of the characters or the particulars of the extraction. The tension of the accident quickly dissipates as the film’s approach transitions away from action to conversation.

Still, there’s a lot to like in “Silo,” including its impressively lived-in feel. The setting and the people are so well-shaded that these characters could’ve spent the day uneventfully farming and they’d have been fascinating to watch.