Silent House Movie Trailer

[Anais Wachowski]

Youmight recall that I wrote about a film at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Gustavo Hernndez's The Slient House which was a haunted house horror film which took place all within one 79-minute continuous shot (read my review here). You might also recall that the American remake premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in January (read Germain's review here) starring indie breakout star Elizabeth Olsen (the younger sister of the Olsen twins).

Supposedly based on a true story, the film follows a daughter and father who are hired to renovate a boarded-up broken down cottage in a rural area of Uruguay. They plan to spend the night at the house and begin repairs the following morning. But the Teenage daughter begins to hear noises from the upstairs, and that is where this haunted house story begins. Watch the trailer embedded after the jump. The trailer gives you a good idea of how the film's handheld cinematography, incorporating only candles and lanterns to light the location. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Official Plot Synopsis: Filmed in one single continuous shot of seventy-eight minutes, The Silent House focuses on Laura, who, second by second, intends to leave a house which hides an obscure secret. Laura and her father, Wilson, settle down in a cottage they have to renew since its owner will soon put the house up for sale. They intend to spend the night there and make the repairs the following morning. Everything seems to go smoothly until Laura hears a sound from outside that gets louder and louder on the upper floor of the house. Wilson goes up to see what is going on while she remains downstairs on her own, waiting for her father to come downThe Silent House hits theaters in the UK in April. No US release date has been set.

A young woman named Sarah is staying at a dilapidated Victorian house in the countryside with her father and her uncle, helping them fix it up. Due to petty fighting between Sarah's uncle and her father, her uncle decides to take a break from working and drives into town to get tools. While her father works upstairs, there is a knock on the door and Sarah answers it, meeting a young woman named Sophia who claims to be one of Sarah's childhood friends, though Sarah does not remember her. The two plan to meet again later.

Soon after, Sarah hears strange noises upstairs and immediately notifies her father. He is not worried, but goes to check, finding nothing. Sarah calms down, but soon hears the sound of her father falling down the stairs. Panicked, Sarah searches for him and finds him unconscious, with a head wound. She tries to leave the house but all exits are locked or boarded up, and she hides from an unknown perpetrator who attempts to grab hold of her under a table. She then runs upstairs, where she discovers that her father's body has disappeared. She runs to the basement in search of the cellar door leading outside, and finds a bed and other human necessities, evidence that someone else has been living there, possibly squatters. She sees a figure shining a light in the basement to find her but she escapes out the cellar door.

Outside, she meets her uncle, who has returned, and sees a young girl on the side of the road who disappears before her eyes. They decide to go back to the house armed with a gun to rescue her father. They discover her father's body to be missing, and find a generator lamp running on the third floor of the house in a pool room. While searching the pool room, the generator kicks off; the only source of light available is a Polaroid camera's flash.

Through a series of incoherent camera flashes, Sarah sees the young girl in the room as well as an unidentifiable man. The power returns to reveal that her uncle is now missing. She is hiding under the pool table surrounded by two men taking pictures of an unseen girl on the top of the table, presumably pedophilic in nature. Sarah then sees her uncle's body being dragged by one of the men toward the staircase. She attempts unsuccessfully to shoot one of the men with her uncle's gun.

Sarah returns to her room to hide, and begins to exhibit signs of extreme paranoia, multiple personalities, and insanity. She has hallucinations of reality and alternate realities that depict traumatic childhood events; including a blood stain appearing on her bed, a young girl in the bathtub with beer bottles and bloody water, and a toilet spewing blood. These vivid hallucinations send Sarah into a state of hysteria, and she returns downstairs.

In the foyer, she is confronted by Sophia, and finds her now conscious father wrapped in plastic, sitting up in the living room. Sophia vanishes, and Sarah's father convinces her to untie him, at which point he slaps her and then begins to whip her with his belt. At the same time, her uncle regains consciousness and tries to stop her father, who mocks his brother's pleas. As his back is turned, Sarah kills him with a sledgehammer. Her uncle begs for mercy and tells her he should have stopped the rape and abuse that went on at the hands of her father. Sarah leaves him and walks outside silently and the film fades to black. In the end, the father turns out to be a rapist.

Silent House is the story of three generations of an Iranian family who live in a one-hundred-year-old house in Tehran. Through archival family footage woven with contemporary images, the two filmmakers portray their family's evolution across 43 years. They follow each family member entangled in the tides of their country's complicated history. With the house itself as a silent witness, the family's story becomes a mirror for society and the family's house a metaphor for Iran.

Farnaz Jurabchian is an independent filmmaker and writer who lives between Tehran and Toronto. She holds a BFA in Film from the Melhoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and a BA in French Literature from the University of Tehran.

Mohammadreza Jurabchian is a freelance filmmaker and photographer currently based in Tehran. He graduated in photography from the Faculty of Art and Architecture at Azad University. Together with his sister Farnaz, they have made several award-winning short films and documentaries that have been shown at a number of international festivals around the world.

Fery Malek-Madani is the founder of the Ellestournent-damesdraaien festival and of the non-profit organisation Art Cantara, which is dedicated to raising the profile of Iranian women in Europe. She has produced several documentaries by Iranian women directors and directed the documentary Les filles, which won the prize for best short documentary at the CMS International Children's film festival in Lucknow, India.

During the search of that trailer and the area I was conducting the search of, I had occasion to go through the contents of two briefcases that he had there. In his brown briefcase, I found some currency which was genuine. It was rolled up and wrapped in an elastic band. Of course I took the elastic band off and examined it to determine if it was, any of it was counterfeit. As I say it was all genuine. That consisted of sixteen ten dollar bills, sixteen five dollar bills and fifty-six one dollar bills.

As I stated before, Mr. Lorenzo was present so at that time, I asked him, in view of the fact that he had almost or in the neighborhood of $300 cash in small change, tens, fives, and ones, and in view of the fact that he turned over to the deputy seventy-five genuine twenty dollar bills among other cash that he had at the time he was arrested, if he didn't think it was a little silly that he had gone to the bank to cash a hundred dollar bill to get three twenties, a ten, and a couple of fives. He didn't reply to that.

I then asked him or explained to him that this appeared to be the result of passing sixteen counterfeit twenty dollar bills and explained that if a twenty dollar bill is passed, it would normally be to purchase a small item worth a dollar or two and get the maximum change. If you pass sixteen twenty dollar counterfeits, you would get back something in the neighborhood of the change contained there, the sixteen tens, the sixteen fives and the fifty-six dollars. I asked him if that didn't indicate to him that the money there was the result of passing counterfeit activities. He shrugged and mumbled something that I was not able to distinguish in response to that.

Once warnings have been given, the subsequent procedure is clear. If the individual indicates in any manner, at any time prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease.

Moreover, where in-custody interrogation is involved, there is no room for the contention that the privilege is waived if the individual answers some questions or gives some information on his own prior to invoking his right to remain silent when interrogated.

The court below was correct in its ruling that the government had sustained its "heavy burden" of proof that the appellant had made a voluntary, knowing and intelligent waiver of her right to remain silent . . . and that appellant had not revoked that waiver.

Since we conclude that Lorenzo did not exercise his Miranda rights at all, we need not decide in what manner he would have been required to revoke his earlier waiver only selectively rather than totally

Total revocation, of course, requires only that the individual indicate in some manner that he wishes to remain silent. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 473-74, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966). Selective exercise of the right to remain silent was accomplished in Egger, by contrast, by the suspect's initial, express declaration that such was his intent. It may well be that the selective exercise of one's Fifth Amendment rights or at least a selective revocation of an earlier complete waiver of those rights requires that some kind of communication to that effect be made to the questioning officers. Since this issue is not before us, however, we do not decide it.

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