Who's that knocking on my door?
Yep, pretty silent, except for all the screaming
Directors Chris Kentis, Laura Lau Screenwriter Laura Lau Cast Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens
Here is a film that is more likely to impress than scare. Depending on what you’re in the mood for, Silent House could be the film for you. It would be best not to expect many jump scares or any blood, gore and guts. Instead be amazed at how this feature film looks as though it was filmed in one long take, without ever making a scene change. There are some black-outs sure, and the number of continuity errors is somewhat laughable, but it’s the real-time, real-life experience that counts. Of course, this was not shot in one long take. But the director tries very hard to keep everything flowing. Film-buffs or any eagle-eyed members of the audience will be able to spot where the edits took place, but why try to dissect and trivialise what actually looks quite remarkable?
Like any haunted house horror, the film opens with an abandoned, worn-down house that is anything but silent. A place you wouldn’t want to live in, essentially. The walls have holes in them, windows have been bolted shut, there is very little light, the phone line is not connected, there is a strange neighbour kid, the floors creak, the doors squeak, and so on. Unknowingly entering this house are Sarah (Olsen) and her family who are getting ready to move out of their lakeside retreat. With her father (Trese) and uncle (Stevens), they are there to pack things up, fix a few dodgy places, so the new owners can move in.
As the work begins, she starts hearing odd noises. Sometimes they’re nothing, but soon they develop into more menacing, demanding knocks and thumps. Upstairs, outside, downstairs in the cellar, everywhere she goes, these sounds start haunting her. Her father, like all men do in horror films, assures here that it’s an empty house and that she’s being paranoid. But this doesn’t put her mind at east, and soon, even her father seems to vanish into thin air.
What’s disappointing is how, aside from the filming technique, everything is so ordinary and predictable. She takes out a kitchen knife. She loses it. She hides under the dining room table. She feels someone grab her leg from behind. She is found. She tries to get out of the house. Oh no, the windows have been bolted shut remember? What about the front door? Darn it, she’s lost the key. The back door? Nope, it’s padlocked shut. She runs upstairs. Hides again. Guess what, found again! It’s a tiresome repetition that was never truly scary in the first place.
But what the seemingly one long take does add to the atmosphere is its undeniably claustrophobic set and with so many shaky close-ups of Olsen, the intensity escalates as when things get going, the audience isn’t given a single second to have a breather. The air feels tight, and because the 88-minute running time is the exact same time period she experiences in the film, you know she can’t do anything radical or unconvincingly heroic. She just doesn’t have the time. And so the anticipation for the ending and answers to our burning questions builds up like never before and the importance of giving a reasonable answer becomes ever more crucial.
Unfortunately, Silent House doesn’t get many points on how creative or how big of a shocker the ending is. Instead what is commendable is how the final few minutes are shot. Using clever camera tricks and angles, it tries its best to explain and tie up the loose ends. But unfortunately like most horror films, not every question is answered. Given the sustained tension in the first half, the pay-off is rather bland, and the short length of the film comes to a surprisingly brisk finale.
After the unprecedented success of the Paranormal Activity series, the phenomenon of “found-footage” horror films has, in recent years, become an almost annual tradition in which half-hearted scripts make their way into shaky-cams and are presented to somehow scare someone. Silent House rises above the worst of the sub-genre, and yet it lacks the truly creepy, horror spectacle. It keeps everything close to Olsen’s character, but sometimes it feels too restricted to allow the audience to truly absorb the atmosphere. It’s nice to see a different idea (although technically this is a remake of an Uruguayan film) not go to waste, and it’s certainly not an awful film to list in Olsen’s growing resume.
