John Woo has returned to Hollywood with a new mute avenger in Silent Night, a Christmas action extravaganza – here’s how to watch it and if it’s available on streaming.
Somewhere, a bevy of doves is about to take flight, because Woo is back. It’s been 20 years since his last western-produced picture (2003’s Paycheck), but with a potent obsession with high-caliber action in pop culture, the king is coming back to do what he does best.
Silent Night stars Joel Kinnaman as a father who experiences the ultimate nightmare when his son is killed. Rendered speechless (literally) by the incident, he sets out to get revenge on the people who killed him at the most wonderful time of the year: Christmas Eve.
Following on from the success of last year’s Violent Night and the John Wick franchise, it looks like a blend of The Punisher, Nobody, and Death Wish. So, there’s just one question: when and how can you watch it?
How to watch and stream Silent Night
Silent Night will arrive in US cinemas on December 1. In the UK, it won’t be getting a theatrical release – but it will drop on streaming via Sky Cinema on December 23.
You can check if the movie is showing in a theater near you and buy tickets here.
Woo spoke about trying to make the film’s action scenes feel “real” in an interview with MovieWeb, especially focusing on sequences with “one long take” as opposed to cutting them apart. “It’s not cheating. I didn’t use shaky cameras or fast cuts. They’re paying for the action and fighting,” he said.
“But I’ll add to that, Joel’s so deep inside the character, so when he fights, he fights with anger, with hate, the hatred for losing his son. And this time I didn’t use pigeons.”
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Reviews for the movie recently arrived online, and while the reception has been broadly positive (its Rotten Tomatoes score is sitting at 77%), there have been some mixed opinions.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “There’s nothing here to match the ingenious audacity of, say, the hospital-shootout-with-infant sequence in 1982’s Hard Boiled, but once Silent Night finally unwraps its gratuitous gifts, the faithful Woo fans should find them worth the wait.”
However, IndieWire also wrote: “The cinema of John Woo does not lend itself well to half-measures. In that light, the kindest thing I can say about his latest film is that its worst moments don’t resemble the cinema of John Woo at all.”
Is Silent Night on Netflix?
No, Silent Night isn’t on Netflix right now.
It’s unclear where Silent Night will arrive on streaming in the US. It’s distributed by Lionsgate, so there’s a chance it could be STARZ, given that’s where John Wick: Chapter 4 debuted.
In the UK, John Wick 4 dropped on Prime Video, so with the help of a VPN you may have multiple options.
You can find out more about Silent Night here.