terrible... so disappointed.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Actor-turned-director Horatiu Malaele's debut feature, jumping on the bandwagon of Romanian New Wave movement in the noughties, SILENT WEDDING abandons itself to its categorically anti-Soviet ideologue nearly at the expense of a galvanizing story. The frame story is set in the present day Romania, a TV crew specializing in paranormal stories, arrives in a desolate area used to be a Communist factory, affected by a spine-tingling frisson whipped up by the presence of a ghostly bride and the remnant old women-in-black there, a witness recounts the harrowing extirpation of the village to build the factory in 1953, the year when Joseph Stalin died. A joyous and rumbustious flashback makes heavy weather about its bucolic landscape and community, peopled by foul-mouthed but overall congenial countryfolk, amongst which a pair of young lovers Mara (Andreea Victor) and Iancu (Potocean) are going to get married (their mutual orgasm is rendered in exhilarating high pitch). Concomitantly Malaele threads farcical episodes of Communist party recruitment (highlighted by slo-motion and slapstick antics) into the through-line, where an event of open-air cinema is interrupted by a passing circus, whose own hilarity is sequentially, abruptly bookended by a tragic death of a young village girl (implied at the hands of a Russian type) and the departure of Iancu's best friend, the homunculus Sile (Palin). On that wedding day, bad tidings is brought by a Soviet officer that due to the death of Stalin the night before, the whole country is entering a 7-days mourning, wedding is forbidden, anyone who revolts will be executed with high treason. Thus, it triggers the "silent wedding", a weighty defiance against authoritarianism, the film reaches its winning apotheosis in the collectively endeavored cooperation to not make any jarring noise in their covert celebration, including using cloth-wrapped glasses, eating with one's hands instead of crockery, miming and mouthing wedding toasts, the wedding band playing silently and a chucklesome message-passing skit, et.al., until a final moment of liberation that sounds their death knell, the authority is as good as his words. That theatrical kicker (embellished with a surreal touch), to some degree, negates the film's prior effort of ingenuity by veering into an easy route to meet its prefigured perdition and its wraith-of-the-past coda. An anomaly repulsing the post-Cold War ethos, SILENT WEDDING, although errs on the side of its own militancy, lands on its feet in its grassroots advocacy and comedic appeal.

Perfect cinema ,good laughs with deep profound feeling, the great of this movie is not long only one hour and a half masterpiece especially at the second half,watch it never miss it

Despite the favorable comments left here by other users, I think that watching this film was a total waste of time. About 45 minutes pass by before the main story even begins. Thus way too much time is wasted introducing the audience to every single character. The film jumps from genre to genre without bothering to resolve every storyline it begins. At one point you may expect this to develop into a crime story, but you can only guess who the perpetrator was. The next moment the film seems to turn into a horror story but after only two scenes that storyline ends without being resolved properly. The key scene may lead you to believe that this film was intended to be a comedy. The actors had to mime everything during that part. But sometimes you can almost "see" the director telling everyone to look right / left / up or down - the whole thing is not exactly acting at its best. The comedy part ends and drama kicks in. Obviously the film makers couldn't make up their mind! The basic story line might have been turned into an interesting film, but unfortunately this chance was wasted.

The story is an interesting one, especially for those who know a little more about communism and the horrible things communists did to people. Unfortunately, the movie is not, by far, as good as the story. Maybe it was intended this way, but, to me, it looks like an amateur movie. The actors did their jobs just fine, but the movie seems to be made out of pieces, as if it was too long and they had to cut a little bit here and there to make it fit. So the action is full of inconsistencies. In the end, I have just had the feeling that there should have been more. I didn't get attached to any of the characters, as I usually do when I really like a movie, and the compassion I felt for the people in the village was completely wiped out by the misplaced scene in the end of the movie.The story is a very painful one, and it's a shame that the movie is only scratching the surface!