Merciless storm

Sharp climate change , the global economic crisis , riots in cities are leading to the spread of public opinion about the approaching end of the world . In the locality where the Grady family farm is located (husband Tom, wife Gillian, son Graham), an unusually prolonged storm has been raging for the seventh day. On the last night of the storm, Silas Hendershot turns out to be on the threshold of their house - a man with a mysterious past, exhausted by the storm and obviously suffering from amnesia. Exhausted, Silas immediately faints, and Tom and Gillian decide to give him shelter during the bad weather. Putting him to bed, they pay attention to the strange tattoos on the back (fancy ornament) and hand (quoted from the Gospel of Luke : "Leave the dead to bury their dead") stranger. The day after the appearance of Silas, clear weather sets in - the storm is over, but nature behaves strangely: all living things have evaporated, you can’t hear the chorus of cicadas (the action takes place in June) or the singing of birds. Silas convinces the farm dwellers that these are the first signs of the end of the world, and quotes from Revelation to confirm his words. Torrential rain, the disappearance of animals, the "blood moon" - all this is seen by Silas as the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecies. Tom is skeptical of Silas' speeches, but after a visit to a neighbor's farm, where all things are intact, given the fact that the owners and the livestock are completely gone, doubts creep into his soul. The departure of all four of them in search of food and fuel to the nearest town, Cairo, also first confirms the fact of the disappearance of all people, but then Tom is attacked by a gang of thugs, from whom Silas came to his rescue in time.

After the return of Grady's family with Silas to the farm, the film finally flows from the apocalyptic thriller genre to the psychological burdened with stamps (see, for example, Mike Figgis 's The Devil Mansion). Gradually, Tom, through old newspapers and a visit to an abandoned police station, manages to get to the bottom of the truth that 22 years before the events described in the movie the farm belonged to Silas' father, who was an alcoholic and because of that he lost land ownership. Enraged, Silas hung his father in a tree, killed several other people, and was kept in prison the whole time. Silas hangs up Tom in the same manner as his father, and tries to convince Gillian to live in a family like husband and wife. Graham saves his father from death, and he manages to master Silas, set fire to him and stab him with pitchforks. During the happy reunion of Tom and Gillian, Graham invites parents to look at the night sky: there, one after another, the stars go out.

Filming took place in the second half of 2008 in Vancouver, British Columbia , Canada . ^[1] Filmed with a small budget (relative to most of Boll's previous projects) with Canadian actors and a Canadian screenwriter and not on the basis of a computer game, Merciless Storm did not find the film distributor and remained on the shelf for a while until being released immediately to DVD in the USA (April 13, 2010) and on DVD and Blu-ray in Germany (April 30, 2010). ^[2] On November 18, 2010, it was released on DVD in Russia by the Central Partnership company under the name “Ruthless Storm”. ^[3]

• "Ruthless Storm" (English) on the Internet Movie Database  
• Merciless storm (eng.) On the site allmovie