Starring Andrew Garfield. Rated 14A

A strange mix of sombre history lesson, artful religious questioning, and stomach-churning graphic violence, Silence is a movie as confounding as it is thought-provoking. The effect is all the more extreme because it is helmed by Martin Scorsese—an icon more associated with gritty New York City streets, aggro Wall Street boiler rooms, and sleazy Vegas casinos than rigorously period-specific 17th-century Japan.

But here he goes, diving deep into the Jesuit world, following two young Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who—Apocalypse Now–like—head to Japan to find their missing spiritual mentor (Liam Neeson). Their guiding missionary is rumoured to have committed apostasy after being tortured by government officials. The duo’s mission is beyond dangerous: Christianity is brutally outlawed in the Asian nation. They have to hide out with converted peasants, holding mass at night, fashioning crosses from straw, and watching from afar as imperial soldiers torture believers in increasingly twisted ways.

The film, one that Scorsese has been trying to make for decades, is a long tale about the trials of Garfield’s Jesuit missionary and his followers. What it’s really obsessed with is laid out clearly in the title: no matter how hard the young priest prays or how much suffering he goes through or witnesses—live burnings, beheadings, slow bleedings, drownings by crucifixion (it’s a thing)—the horrors meet with silence from on high. That sound of nothing is best depicted in a recurring image of an ancient, blank-staring portrait of Jesus in a crown of thorns, one the character sees whenever he falls into some delirium of hunger or pain.

And all this leads to the frustrating and yet so utterly fascinating ambiguity about Silence. Scorsese seems to be celebrating the commitment of the Jesuits (whom he consulted at length for authenticity in the film) while at the same time casting their God as unknowable, unanswering, and unreachable. A lifelong Catholic, Scorsese has painted a complicated portrait of faith—a subject that could not be more unfashionable.

If you find that off-putting, so be it: you still have a little-known period of history gorgeously rendered here. And Garfield, who reportedly immersed himself in the Jesuit spiritual exercises, brings real intensity to the role, at first naively fervent, then heavily conflicted. The Japanese parts are nuanced too, especially Issey Ogata’s smiling Inquisitor.

But Scorsese’s tone is relentlessly grim. He’s dragged you through an endless amount of mud and drizzle and blood, for what? Was it wrong to try to convert “the swamp of Japan”? Could it be there are no heavenly signs because there’s no God? Scorsese doesn’t seem to support either of these ideas. But he’s not giving answers either. Just God-like silence.