Silent House

Silent House is an American remake of the 2010 Uruguayan horror movie The Silent House made in much the same style as the original by the husband and wife directing team of Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (Open Water). Like the original, the entire movie appears to be shot all in one continuous take (it is actually a clever combination of more than 15 individual set-ups). Working with a very small budget (though not as small as the original’s $6000) the filmmakers create a far more technically effective movie, but unfortunately, they make only slight improvements to the deficiencies in the story. This new film stars Elizabeth Olsen, the talented star of Martha Marcy May Marlene, as a young girl who returns to an old family vacation home with her father and uncle to clean it up for a future sale. Mysterious and terrifying things begin to happen and she becomes trapped in the house for nearly the entire 87 minutes of the movie.   

As with any film made to look like it was shot in a single take (Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, or the original The Silent House) the style overpowers the substance to a certain degree and the technique feels more like a gimmick then the best way to tell the story. However, this remake manages to avoid one of the biggest problems of the original. In The Silent House, the camera perspective shifts in ways that often pull the viewer out of emotional alignment with the main character--sometimes actually changing over to the POV of another character. In the remake, we always feel like we are with Olson as she creeps around the house. The camera rarely seems like it is leading or following her and therefor we don’t get the sensation that we are just watching this girl, we feel connected to her. This makes the remake far scarier than the original. It is too bad Lau’s screenplay adaptation does not fix the original film’s ending by creating a more effective set-up. While the climactic reveal in this movie is less clumsily handled than in the original, it is still a pretty big let down. If Lau had been able to more credibly set up the family dynamics between Olson’s character her father and his brother during the early scenes of the picture, the ending could have paid off well--and Silent House would then have been a modern-classic horror movie, rather than an interesting trick-film.