Toronto, Canada. A few days before Christmas, Miles Cullen, a bored teller working at a bank branch located in a shopping mall, accidentally learns that the place is about to be robbed when he finds a disconcerting note on one of the counters.
A pulpy thriller/noir with a slightly oddball feel that's difficult to divorce from its Canadian terroir, with enough small touches here and there that hints at some artistic brain behind the film.
[P]layfully toys with the tropes of the thriller genre, counterbalancing its escalating tension and sense of impending violence with a dark humor and offbeat romanticism that accompanies Miles’s growth into a more fearless, and eventually arrogant, man. It’s a tricky tonal balance […].
— Derek Smith (Slant Magazine)
Miles’ self-serving plan—which is to secretly shortchange the thief when he shows up and keep the difference for himself—is a good one; it’s also loosely analogous to the creative accounting of the tax-shelter era, which was predicated on skimming off the top (and under the noses of government authority). While I wouldn’t suggest that The Silent Partner was designed as a film-industrial allegory, the centrality of money and the best places to hide it (from a lunchbox to a jam jar to a locked safety-deposit box) do keep gesturing towards these contingencies. […] [Elaine's]gratuitous decapitation by fish tank [was] shot by the second unit when [director Daryl] Duke refused to do it.
— Adam Nayman (Cinema Scope)
