Unlike Martin Scorsese’s previous forays into the subject of spiritual faith, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997) – both of which used intense, almost delirious musical compositions to evoke a sense of religious fervour – his new film has no score at all. An adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, it opens on the intensifying sounds of nature, the buzzing of gnats or crickets, abruptly cut off by a hefty silence. Or is it the silence of the void? This question haunts the two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver), who have been sent to mid-seventeenth-century Japan to stoke the dying embers of a Christianity under merciless attack by local authorities.