Metacritic reviews

A small but wonderful gem of a thriller: A film in which complicated people and a very complicated plot come together in a mechanism that leaves us marveling at its ingenuity.

A dense, quirky, uncommonly interesting movie, this time with a high quotient of suspense.

An undervalued 1978 thriller with an ingenious script by Curtis Hanson. [23 Feb 2001, p.18]

The battle of wits is peppered with funny lines and the suspense seldom flags.

The Silent Partner is one of the films that run the gamut from intrigue to violence.

Before it takes an appalling turn for the vicious, The Silent Partner seems an uncommonly clever and gripping suspense thriller. Even after the story threatens to self-destruct, you fight the impulse to suffer a major letdown, for the sake of the swell nerve-racking time you've been having up to that point.

Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.

If it weren't for the gimmicks (and the sadism is so gratuitous it could be nothing else), then the film could easily pass for a minor caper thriller of the '60s, all convoluted plot and calculated kookiness. But cyphers (both female leads) and question-marks (who'll get the money, who'll survive - who cares?) dominate the script as every labyrinthine twist becomes more plodding.