Most indie films get made on a tight budget. The Man With the Silver Case got made on a tight budget during the coldest winter Switzerland had seen in 20 years.
Writer-director Colin Best’s black-and-white neo-noir follows a nameless Man in Gray (Stuart Reid) who takes a job delivering a mysterious silver case for a shadowy organization. Handcuffed to it and hunted by people willing to kill for it, he retreats to a safe house, where an unprepared family is pulled into the violence he brings with him.
“You watch most of these movies and you know where they’re going from minute two,” Best said. He set out to make one you can’t call,
Nineteen days and no second angle
Best shot the film in 19 days, on a single camera, on location in Switzerland. One camera means every setup has to count, because there is no second angle waiting in the edit. The weather added its own pressure. Reid, a classically trained stage actor, did his own stunts in freezing conditions, and the production pulled off a helicopter jump, all for a budget smaller than a car commercial.
Built in black and white
Best shot in native black and white, so the monochrome look was built on set. The images come from cinematographer Jay Keitel, a 2020 Film Independent Spirit Award nominee for Best Cinematography for She Dies Tomorrow, whose credits include Mrs. Davis and Outer Range. Snow, fog and hard winter light give the film its texture, and the frame does most of the talking.
Critics have noticed. Film Threat’s Ricky Archuleta gave it a 7 out of 10 and wrote, “Witnessed through black and white, every scene is a stunning visual treat.” Screen Critix singled it out as an unusually confident first feature, IndyRed gave it four out of five stars and INFLUX Magazine scored it an 8 out of 10.
A noir built around one object
The setup is pure genre. A nameless professional, a case nobody explains and a safe house that stops being safe are the oldest tools in the noir kit, and Best uses them with restraint. The film keeps its exposition lean and lets atmosphere and image carry the tension. The silver case works the way the best noir objects do: the less the film tells you about it, the more you want to know.
The cast
Reid is best known for the title role in The Bodyguard on London’s West End, and he also played Joey “The Lips” Fagan in Roddy Doyle’s musical The Commitments. Film Threat praised his performance for its classic Hollywood quality. Lara Marian, a Swiss-German actor known for the German series Kreuzberg and an award winner for the film Gaslighting, plays the mother. Verity Jones, a West End dancer and actor from The Bodyguard, Flashdance and Dirty Dancing, makes her feature film debut as the Company Woman.
Tom Ohmer plays the father, and he did double duty on set. His more than 75 credits run from the Oscar-winning Breaking Away to Criminal Minds and NCIS: Los Angeles, and years in the US Army made him a marksman and firearms expert. On this film he also worked on the stunts and the armory, which matters on a production with no room for a second take.
Indie pedigree behind the camera
Producer Chris Martin is a San Francisco-based producer whose credits include Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Earth Mama, Fremont and Shortcomings, along with Test, which was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2015 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Keitel, a CalArts graduate based in Los Angeles, also shot Sun Don’t Shine and the second season of The Girlfriend Experience.
A musician in the director’s chair
This is Best’s feature directing debut, but he is no newcomer to making things. He founded The Academy of Chess and Checkers, a musical collective with six albums released since 2005, and produced The Black Jacket, a 2016 documentary set in South Central Los Angeles. That ear shows up in the soundtrack, which runs from Sonny Rollins to The Cure’s “A Forest” and the Grateful Dead’s “Dire Wolf.”
A release with a mystery of its own
Best carried the film’s central question off the screen. This fall, a clue hidden inside the movie launched What’s In The Silver Case?, a $25,000 hunt across Los Angeles with a three-day finale set for Oct. 28 to 30. The only way in was to watch the film first. Players who solved the opening clue registered at the campaign site, and from there the hunt moved off the screen and into Los Angeles, where players could compare notes on released clues while completing every step themselves. It is a fitting move for a film built around one unanswered question: what’s in the case?
Where to watch
The Man With the Silver Case is streaming on Prime Video and free on Kapang, with links to both on the film’s official site. For fans of lean, old-school noir, it is a rare new entry shot the hard way.
Hi! I’m Bryan, and I’m a passionate & expert writer with more than five years of experience. I have written about various topics such as product descriptions, travel, cryptocurrencies, and online gaming in my writing journey.
