Scorsese's marathon mission: The director's pet project is a heavenly - but bloody - epic about two priests in Japan. Yet at nearly three hours, it's hellishly long, says BRIAN VINER 

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Silence (15) 

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Martin Scorsese, by all accounts, made The Wolf Of Wall Street, his 2013 chronicle of rampant sybaritic excess in modern-day Manhattan, in part so he could raise the finance to make Silence, a hugely solemn, heavy-duty epic about Christian martyrdom in 17th-century Japan.

That’s like the same Mrs Gascoigne giving birth to both Bamber and Paul. Silence is everything The Wolf Of Wall Street was not, and demands that we take it at least as seriously as it takes itself. It is a film worthy of respect, admiration even, but sitting through its two hours and 41 minutes feels like an endurance test. Scorsese, who once had ambitions to go into the Catholic priesthood, has wanted to make this movie for nigh on 30 years, so I can understand why no one on the production team gave a polite cough and said: ‘Marty, it could lose a chunk here and there.’ All the same, I wish someone had.

Silence is an adaptation by Scorsese and regular collaborator Jay Cocks (The Last Temptation Of Christ, The Age Of Innocence) of a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo. It stars Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as Fathers Rodrigues and Garrpe, Jesuit priests from Portugal who journey to Japan in search of their long-lost mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson).

Adam Driver stars as a Jesuit priest from Portugal who journeys to Japan in search of his long-lost mentor

It is a film worthy of respect, admiration even, but sitting through its two hours and 41 minutes feels like an endurance test

There are rumours in Lisbon that Ferreira has been forced to ‘apostatise’ or renounce his Christian faith. It is also said that he is living somewhere as a Buddhist, having even taken a Japanese wife. But his two former proteges cannot bring themselves to believe this of such a mightily pious man.

As their quest to find Ferreira unfolds, we learn just how hard it is to keep Christianity alive in 17th-century Japan.

And never mind the perilous spiritual journey, it’s not easy to see where you’re going physically, either — the Land of the Rising Sun is recast as the Land of the Rolling Mist. Scorsese has his fog machines at full throttle, presumably to make some kind of point about clarity of faith and thought. There are metaphors looming everywhere.

As actors, both Garfield and Driver have the heft to cope with such weighty material. The latter in particular is well cast. He has the bony, gaunt face of a worried El Greco saint, and plenty to be worried about.

Nothing about this film is fun or entertaining. But its weightiness might just bag Scorsese yet another Oscar nomination, to go with the 12 he has already

Earlier European missionaries have had a little success in converting some peasant communities, but the authorities are determined to stamp out the spread of Christianity, just as though it were a contagious disease.

They have an alarming repertoire of torture options for anyone unwilling to defile, publicly, an image of Christ.

Meanwhile, Rodrigues and Garrpe go their less-than-merry way, bringing spiritual succour to all the underground Christians, who fall upon even their rosary beads, treating them like holy relics.

But the two priests must stay out of the clutches of a kind of Lord High Executioner (Issey Ogata), not that he bears the slightest resemblance to a Gilbert and Sullivan character.

Scorsese, who once had ambitions to go into the Catholic priesthood, has wanted to make this movie for nigh on 30 years, so I can understand why no one on the production team gave a polite cough and said: ‘Marty, it could lose a chunk here and there.’

For a while, they watch from the undergrowth as secret Christians are brutally persecuted, but it seems like only a matter of time — albeit, lots of it — before they, too, are discovered. They do have a sly guide, a Christian convert. Alas, he comes from the Judas Iscariot school of loyalty.

Only when Rodrigues has himself been taken captive and is being ‘encouraged’ to apostatise, does he — and do we — learn what really did become of Father Ferreira.

Neeson gives a tremendously powerful, affecting performance — yet another reminder that there is a hell of an actor underneath all that beefcake.

And hell here is the operative word. Nothing about this film is fun or entertaining. But its weightiness might just bag Scorsese yet another Oscar nomination, to go with the 12 he has already.

A Monster Calls (12A) 

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Liam Neeson pops up again in A Monster Calls, and having been so terrific in Silence, here he is completely, uncompromisingly wooden. Happily, he’s meant to be.

He inhabits the title character, a monster in the guise of an enormous old yew tree, which towers over a graveyard, but comes to life every night to offer a rather alarming brand of psychotherapy to a young boy, Conor (Lewis MacDougall), who is being forced to come to terms with his mother’s terminal illness.

She is played by Felicity Jones, and her own mother by (a slightly miscast) Sigourney Weaver, so Spanish director J.A. Bayona (The Impossible) has plenty of heavyweight talent at his disposal, and expertise in the special-effects department. But the story sits mainly on young MacDougall’s slight shoulders.

Each night, the tree tells Conor a weird and troubling fairy story, on the understanding that after three of these fables, Conor must then turn storyteller himself, but he has to speak the truth

Liam Neeson inhabits the title character, a monster in the guise of an enormous old yew tree, which towers over a graveyard

He does a fine job. Nonetheless, it’s a curious film, beautifully rendered and at times deeply moving, yet somehow, I reckon, managing to be too scary and confusing for most children, yet too childlike and simplistic for many adults.

It is scripted by Patrick Ness as an adaptation of his own award-winning book, and is set by the look of it in west Yorkshire, although pretty much everyone in it sounds as though they come from the Home Counties.

That includes Conor and the boys at school who bully him relentlessly. The poor kid isn’t getting much pleasure from life. His mum is dying, his feckless father (Toby Kebbell) lives with his new family in America, and granny Weaver doesn’t seem to like him at all.

It’s a curious film, beautifully rendered and at times deeply moving, yet somehow, I reckon, managing to be too scary and confusing for most children, yet too childlike and simplistic for many adults

So his only emotional prop is the tree-monster, but therapists don’t come any growlier or scarier.

Each night, the tree tells Conor a weird and troubling fairy story, on the understanding that after three of these fables, Conor must then turn storyteller himself, but he has to speak the truth.

Truth matters as much as fantasy in this world of magic realism, but ultimately the message is that cancer, bullies, divorce, and all the other horrible things in a child’s life, can’t be easily explained, let alone eradicated, but can at least be absorbed as part of the growing-up process.

And on that sombre note, Happy New Year.