Mute Witness is thirty this year – and, despite the title, Anthony Waller’s debut still has a whole lot to say.
While it wasn’t a huge hit on its release, Mute Witness has developed something of a cult following in the three decades since it came out – and, as it turns thirty in 2025, it seemed like the perfect time to take a look back over this iconic (and utterly weird) debut feature from writer-director Anthony Waller. It follows the story of Billy (Marina Zudina), a mute make-up artist on the set of a new slasher flick, who witnesses the production of a snuff film, and gets pulled in to a chaotic criminal underground led by the mysterious Reaper (Alec Guiness, in his last cinematic release).
Mute Witness is a movie packed-out with genre references – there’s everything from giallo to crime thriller to slapstick caper on display here, as the story bounces from act to act. And that’s not exactly a shock, given that it was Waller’s first feature-length movie – many first-time directors wind up pulling heavily from their influences for the debuts, the best paying homage, the worst attempting staid rip-offs that never grow beyond the creators who’ve inspired them.
But, despite how reference and trope-heavy Mute Witness is, what really lifts it out of the pitfalls of a derivative debut is how it finds overlap between these various genres. Waller uses the tension of a thriller chase scene to feed into slapstick comedy and slasher alike, the oversaturated colours and shadows of giallo to create a shadowy crime underbelly to the story, the meta-narrative of movie-making to dip into caper territory. It’s an insane blend of genres on paper, but Waller finds the common ground between them so that they, somehow, make perfect sense.
And the reason that he pulls off of this off is because he’s really, really good at what he does. For a debut, Mute Witness is an incredibly, confidently assured, with some downright outstanding sequences that stand up there with all-time great thrillers – he makes great use of sound and silence, a central theme given the main character’s muteness, to create this slick and unique feel to the movie that never gives you time to process how much is going on and how many genres he’s just leapt between in the last ten minutes.
Mute Witness is still, probably, the crown jewel in Waller’s slightly-less-than-illustrious career (the less said about American Werewolf in Paris, the better) – a striking, weird, and utterly watchable debut. I would love to hear your take on the movie below, if you’ve seen it; jump into the comments and let me know!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Frame Rated)
No But Listen 