Set in 17th-century Japan, Silence is the story of two young Portuguese priests who dare to enter the island empire during the time when the Tokugawa shogunate was attempting to eradicate the Christian religion. As the two priests search for their former teacher, an older missionary rumored to have committed apostasy rather than suffer the tortures of the shogun’s chief inquisitor, their beliefs are subjected to fiendish tests both physical and psychological. This adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel is one of the filmmaker’s most intensely spiritual films, a discovery of faith through suffering.  Silence ends Martin Scorsese’s decades-long creative quest with a thoughtful, emotionally resonant look at spirituality and human nature that stands among the director’s finest works.