Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that we have encountered some problems in the marketing for Silent House, and would seek to rectify them immediately: No, this horror remake was not filmed in a single take as the filmmakers would have you believe. No, it’s not based on a real story. And no, The Blair Cleavage Project never made it to the shortlist of possible titles, though it should have.
A remake of a 2012 Uruguayan horror by Gustavo Hernandez and inspired by the filming technique of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, Elizabeth Olsen (luminous in this year’s Martha Marcy May Marlene) plays Sarah, a young woman helping her father and uncle repair an old country house that has no electricity, boarded up windows and a serious case of things that go bump in the night. When Sarah begins to hear noises around the house and her father is mysteriously attacked, she finds herself trapped inside, unable to escape her unseen stalkers.
Directed by Open Water’s Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, Silent House is yet another film with a nice gimmick, but with so little plot or character development that its 88-minute run time becomes agonizing. As hand-held cameras follow Sarah around the often impenetrably dark house, there’s no sense of investigative momentum or purpose.Instead Sarah becomes a clichéd cipher, stumbling aimlessly from room to blackened room until the blatantly obvious climax arrives. With some none-too-subtle infantilised, psychosexual undertones between Sarah’s relationship with her “Daddy” and pervy uncle (can we please strike the phrase “I can’t believe how grown up you are” from the English language?), a shaky cam that is sea-sick inducing and constant orgasmic, breast-heaving hyperventilating from a wasted Olsen, Silent House is a horror by numbers that still manages to be a sloppy mess.