Silent House (2011 Film)

[Keesha Ondieki]

SILENTHOUSE sits around a 5.2 on IMDB. Usually, once the rankings at the end of each article comes in, I am somewhere in the neighborhood of the IMDB average. Sometimes a little up or down, but usually I am within a point and a half (unless I really hate something). Rarely am I several points higher than the average impression of the masses.

The opening shot is a majestic look down on Sarah as she considers the water. The crane comes down, and the camera operator steps off the platform and follows Sarah as she walks towards the house. Right away, it is apparent that the camera is a character here, is important here. By drawing so much attention to the device of the camera, we are intended to realize something. More on that in the spoilers.

And that is where we will end the non-spoiler section of this. For those that want to know the ranking, zip down to the bottom, beneath both pictures, for the scores (spoiler alert: it gets high marks). For those who have seen it and want to engage a little further, read between the pictures. LAST WARNING, SPOILERS BELOW.

The last ambiguity I have is a matter of what is actually there and what she merely sees. Both happen. Her father and uncle are assaulted by something. It actually happens. But her friend is imaginary and unseen. What about the bathroom? The people outside? Those could be images only she can pick up on, or it is possible that she has the power to manifest these things in a way that they actually do happen.

When she finally takes over control, when she steps into the place of the man she has created to do all this damage, she is suddenly on her own. It leads to that one badly acted scene after she frees her father when he instantly goes insane in an unbelievable way. At that point the entities have left, her subconscious and her conscious have, quite literally, joined up in the same spot. She is left to fight for herself. She does, gladly, even making a choice to let her uncle live.

Finally, she walks out the door, into the front yard, and then out of the frame. The camera stays trained on the house, the silent house, for a moment before cutting to black. The last thing we see is not her, but the house.

"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?

The setup is simple enough: a young woman, Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), is helping her father, John (Adam Trese), and her uncle, Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens), in preparing their old lakeside house for sale. The windows are boarded up and the power is shut off, so the only sources of light inside the immense house are flashlights and lanterns (and perhaps that Polaroid camera, too, if all else fails), and the only apparent exit is through the front door (which conveniently locks with a key on the inside). After a brotherly quarrel results in Uncle Peter driving into town to cool off for a while, things start to get interesting, though sometimes downright odd. First, there is a knock at the door, which Sarah answers and is greeted by Sophia (Julia Taylor Ross), a woman living nearby who claims to be a childhood friend of hers. This is merely the first of the many red flags raised without the least bit of subtlety. In this case, it is not the fact that Sarah does not remember her, but that Sophia is just weird. This does not appear to faze Sarah, though, and she agrees to meet with her later to talk more.

Despite its faults, Silent House is not unworthy of some praise. The illusion of being shot in one continuous take is a remarkable achievement, and while I noticed a few of the more obvious areas in which a cut could be made (such as when the frame is enveloped in total darkness), I was otherwise awestruck at its seamlessness. There is one scene near the end of the film that is particularly impressive, concerning alternating actor placement as the camera rotates around them, but to discuss it in specific detail would be to spoil whatever surprise some viewers may find in the ending. Also worth noting is Elizabeth Olsen, who recently had her breakthrough role in Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011). She does what she can with the material, delivering a stalwart performance that carries the film more so than its aesthetic gimmick. The frame is constantly following Olsen wherever she goes, frequently edging its way into close-ups that allow her to shine with harrowing, expressive displays of fear, her silent screams resonating far truer than the disposable jump scares. With long takes requiring her to stay in character for extended periods of time, her role is no doubt a demanding one, but she never fails to be as convincing as possible; she is simply a pleasure to watch.

Overall, I would consider this new Silent House to be a more worthwhile film than the one that inspired it, but that would not be much in the way of a compliment, as it suffers from similar shortcomings, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent. It has all the trappings of an effective thriller, but it is flooded with red herrings that never cease in diminishing the intensity of any given moment. For me, the experience was comparable to having a fellow patron texting in the theater. After each text is read and replied to, the bright light vanishes as the phone is put away, but before too long the phone vibrates to signal another message, and the annoyance begins anew. I recognize, though, that some moviegoers are indifferent to such things, and if you count yourself among them, I might recommend giving Silent House a rental when it hits home video; perhaps you will find more to admire than I did. An audio commentary track, should it accompany the release, might be interesting.

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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