A young underage murders his parents. Six years later he is released. In all this time he has used silence as an intimidating weapon and as a mechanism for not collaborating with justice. What were the motives for the crime? And what are your intentions now back on the street? With this approach begins El silencio, the new and disturbing thriller starring Arón Piper (Elite, The mess you leave) that this Friday arrives on Netflix and that has been created by Aitor Gabilondo, responsible for series such as Living without permission or the adaptation of Homeland.
“I have always been impressed by young murderers, even children,” says Gabilondo, who remembers a crime in the United Kingdom in which two kids killed a baby and years later they were reinserted, with their identity changed, in cities that were not theirs. and different from each other. “I was interested not so much in the crime itself, but rather what happens later, once the sentence has been served in a juvenile center, what can be expected of these kids? Was it a crime, an accident, or was there really something else going on in their heads?
From those uncertainties the story of El silencio came to him. “The main issue is how we relate to violence and to a violent person or who has been violent in their past,” says Gabilondo. Another related theme is “the obsession with control”, which in the series is exercised by the mother of the protagonist Sergio (Piper) and the young psychiatrist Ana (Almudena Amor), who sets up a 24-hour observation device to determine its potential danger to the society.
Precisely between Sergio and Ana a special and addictive relationship is established. A game between observed and observer. Ana and her team of investigators try to decipher each of Sergio’s gestures and end up falling into their own trap and seeing what they want to see. “Who is the prey then? The one on the screen or who is watching him?” Gabilondo wonders.
To develop this game, Gabilondo was inspired by a novel that fascinated him, The Prey, by Kenzaburo Oé, about an American plane that was shot down in a remote town in Japan during World War II. The pilot survives and its inhabitants, who do not know what to do, put the children of the town to take care of him, who only observe him, because they do not speak the same language. “And they are so aware of it that in the end they become prey to the prey. In El silencio, the same parallelism occurs: they are so aware of Sergio that little by little the viewer discovers almost more of those who are observing him than of the observed. And it’s as if the camera turned against them. It’s kind of what he intended.”
In this context, the actor Arón Piper does an extraordinary job. “I saw him in the series El desorden que dejas and his resounding physical presence and his very intimidating look struck me,” recalls Gabilondo, who was looking for an actor for another series and suddenly thought that Piper fit perfectly in El silencio. He is also a well-known actor on social networks, where he is followed by millions of people. “I asked him about that circumstance and he confirmed that he felt he was constantly being watched, which helped him fit the role of Sergio so well.”