Silent House Movie Review

[Alexandrin Chaples]

Silent House" is another one of those Scream at the Screen movies, in which you want to shout out advice to a character. In this case, a nubile young woman is trapped inside an apparently haunted house for most of the time, and what you want to shout is, Get out of the damn house! Finally, a little beyond the halfway mark, she does escape, running out the front door and flees, weeping and stumbling, down a country road until her Uncle Peter drives along, and they return to the house and she goes back inside.

Soon she's reduced to tiptoeing through the darkness calling out "Uncle Peter?" when not long before she was calling "Dad? Daddy?" This is an optimistic girl. Her name is Sarah, and she's played by Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley. We saw her not long ago in the challenging lead role of "Martha Marcy May Marlene." In that film, she demonstrated she's a gifted actress, and in "Silent House," she performs a rite of passage for many young actresses, as the endangered heroine of a horror film.

Whatever. The camera remains always close to Sarah, sometimes almost resting on her shoulder, and what's impressive is Olsen's ability to sustain that kind of intense on-cam scrutiny and stay convincingly in character. She has a pretty face, expressive and delicate, and carefully modulates her performance: not overacting, not mugging, not trying to sell us on anything. Some of her best moments communicate silent terror.

The "Silent House" is her family's summer home, quite large, three floors, with a seemingly unlimited number of doors located at right angles to other doors, so that in another world, this would be a good location for a slapstick farce. There's also an unreasonably high number of closet doors and doors opening into staircases.

Sarah, dad John (Adam Trese) and Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) enter the house. It's daylight, but window boards make it pitch black inside. They carry bright lamps. Left alone, she begins to hear things. Tappings, squeakings, scuttlings, breathings, creakings, moanings, clickings. This house embodies a full rhythm section.

Creeping through the dark, she finds her dad again, and then Uncle Peter leaves for a while and things get really heavy. The secret of the plot is revealed to be unexpectedly fraught, and a surrealistic element enters with bodies in bathtubs and a toilet mounted vertically on a wall and dripping a stream of blood.

My attention was held for the first act or so. Then any attempt at realism was abandoned, and it became clear that the house, and the movie containing it, were devices to manufacture methodical thrills. The explanation, if that's what it was, seemed contrived and unconvincing. To some degree, the ending of a film should seem vaguely necessary, don't you think?

Chris Kentis and Laura Lau Americanize Gustavo Hernandez's La Casa Muda into Silent House, adding Elizabeth Olsen's strident histrionics in the form of Sarah, a young girl trapped in her lakeside childhood home with her unconscious father (Adam Trese), lit by a few hurricane lamps and flourescent lanterns throwing lots of shadows (mostly across her bosom), and being stalked by an intruder or intruders, unknown or known, making her scream a lot as she looks for a way out upstairs and downstairs.

No, it isn't quite like the French movie Them, though at times I wished it followed that film's straightforward simplicity of unremitting terrorization. And no, it also isn't at all like 2009's The Uninvited with Emily Browning, except perhaps for a familiar psychological scrambling involving mirror mirror on the wall duality. This duality provides answers at the end of Silent House as well as the twist ending that's not so twisted because of the neon-sign-obvious inclinations of Sarah's uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens), and the polaroid snapshots, popping up in unlikely places, he and her father are unnerved by.

The anachronistic use of a polaroid camera to take photographs of mold, and to provide intermittent flashbulb light for Sarah as she becomes more terrorized by what's happening around her in the dark, distracts more than it sharpens the suspense. The camera exists for the sole purpose of implying a relationship between those unnerving photographs and their possible photographer, therefore diminishing uncertainty, too early, as to what is really happening to Sarah and her perceptions of what is happening; a cinematic contrivance so threadbare it's obvious, even if we see mysterious people in the house, and Sarah talking to a strange childhood friend she doesn't remember, although they played dress-up together.

The audience promotion gimmick of filming Sarah in one long take (more or less) as the camera shakily follows her, looks at her, sees what see sees, and runs from the house with her, doesn't bring anything to this production that a less shaky view would have. Lighting throughout the house is impressively sinister, but the rooms and hallways get slightly brighter toward the climactic ending, either a studiously planned subtlety showing Sarah's growing realization of the truth, or the camera crew got tired of tripping over their feet in the dark house.

What makes this movie good is Olsen's intensely executed performance (or cleavage, I've not fully decided yet), and its (the movie, not her cleavage) ability to hold our fear within the shuttered house, at least for a short while. And then there's the "lift-gate open" scene outside the house. It sparkles with terror more than any other moment.

I agree with your assessment. I went to take my teen daughter who wanted to see it, even after I told her about the bad reviews. In my view this is more of a suspense or thriller than horror. And I found the attempt at one-shot subjective perspective more irritating than helpful, even though I recognize it is supposed to support the "revelation" at the end that Sarah is working through her own psychological issues rather than encountering a supernatural other. While some laud this as a breakthrough in a tired American horror cycle, I'll look for hope elsewhere.

So Silent House well the title is a bit of joke because this is anything but a book about silence or a silent house .The book is set in the early eighties a turbulent time in Turkey and we are with Fatima and yes at start as she await the hoards to descend (her extended family of grandchildren to arrive for the summer ).The family arrive one by one and each member of the family is like a jigsaw piece as they arrive we learn a bit more about the family ,but also about turkey as a whole as each one of her grandchildren represent a different face of turkey Faruk is the idealist a troubled historian ,the sister Nilgun that is part of a new elite in turkey with money ,a drop-out ,a right-winger ,As they arrive the hose becomes very vocal and the house becomes a micro version of The turkey of the time .The book is set in 1980 just a coup is in the offering .

The purveyors of the horror thriller Silent House promise a uniquely scary experience on three fronts: No. 1. It is inspired by true events. No. 2. It is shown in real time. No. 3. It is presented as a single take.

Silent House is a remake of a much creepier, no-budget Uruguayan film of the same name, La Casa Muda. Supposedly based on a real 1940s crime, both films tell the story of a girl who becomes trapped in a rundown house.

The film looks like a good sell; however, the foundation rests on shaky ground. There is only so much a single-take gimmick can do with a less-than-satisfying plot. The third act reveals a twist that disappoints; the clenching was for nothing but getting firmer glutes. In the end, the real silent house may be a theatre full of unimpressed filmgoers.

Silent House is a 2011 American independent psychological horror film directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, and starring Elizabeth Olsen. The plot focuses on a young woman who is terrorized in her family vacation home while cleaning the property with her father and uncle. The film is a remake of the 2010 Uruguayan film, La Casa Muda (lit. English:The Silent House),[3] which was allegedly based on an actual incident that occurred in a village in Uruguay in the 1940s. It is notable for its use of "real time" footage and the manufactured appearance of a single continuous shot, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and was subsequently purchased by Open Road Films and Universal Pictures for distribution. Silent House premiered in United States theaters on March 9, 2012. It opened at number 5 at the U.S. box office, earning $6.6 million during its opening weekend; it would go on to gross a total of $12.8 million domestically. The film received mixed reviews from critics.

A young woman named Sarah is staying at her family's dilapidated Victorian house in the countryside with her father John and her uncle Peter, helping them fix it to be put up for sale. After a petty argument between John and Peter, Peter leaves and drives into town for extra tools. Sarah meets a young woman named Sophia at the front door. Sophia claims to be one of Sarah's childhood friends, though Sarah does not remember her.

Soon after, Sarah panics when she hears John falling down the stairs. She tries to leave the house but all exits are blocked, and she hides from an unknown perpetrator. She finds John unconscious with a head wound and runs to the basement in search of the cellar door that leads outside. She finds a bed and other evidence that someone else has been living there, possibly squatters. She sees a figure searching for her and escapes out the cellar door.

Outside, she meets Peter, who has returned, and sees a young girl on the road who disappears. Peter and Sarah discover John's body missing in the house. When the power is cut off, the only light source available to them is the flash on a Polaroid camera. Through a series of camera flashes, Sarah sees the young girl and a man in the room. The power returns to reveal Peter missing. Sarah hides while two men take pictures, presumably pedophilic in nature, of an unseen girl. Sarah tries to shoot one of the men with Peter's gun, then hides in her room and begins to show signs of paranoia and psychosis. She experiences hallucinations of traumatic childhood events, including a bloodstain on the bed and the young girl in the bathtub with beer bottles and bloody water.

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