Silent House

There were several problems faced by Gustavo Hernández’s zero-budget Uruguayan horror flick “The Silent House,” which was never intended for English-speaking audiences but sparked enough interest in the festival circuit to gain a western release in April of last year. One problem was that its narrative, a deceptively simple one, lacked the all-important power to hook and engage the viewer, resulting in the film horribly sagging come the midway point as the increasingly repetitive images projected on-screen began to succumb to tiresome monotony.

Another was that, as a horror film, it was notably lacking in the scares department, much as it provided a few thunderous bumps and jolts to rouse you from your momentary, reoccurring slumbers. Chief among these problems, however, was the shocking twist ending, which, not to give anything away, completely undid all that came before and left many viewers, myself included, with that same feeling as when it turns out that all the high-stakes tension and tear-soaked emotion you just witnessed unfold was, phew, all just an inconsequential dream.

Now the film has a bigger budgeted US remake, which suffers from all of these same problems, just to a slightly lesser degree. Curiously renamed to simply “Silent House,” this near-identical redo is directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, whose 2003 horror hit “Open Water,” which saw a scuba-diving couple stranded in the middle of shark-infested waters, sent an unwelcome chill up many a viewer’s spine. Their work here is much less effective, but it’s at least admirably crafted and carried out with the same visceral rawness that awarded them a fair amount of success and attention almost ten years ago.

The film stars in its leading role up-and-comer Elizabeth Olsen, whose breathtaking debut came last year in Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a different kind of horror film. In “Silent House,” Olsen plays Sarah, a young woman who is helping her father (Adam Trese, “40 Days and 40 Nights”) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens, “As the World Turns”) refurbish their old family house that sits by a river in, gasp, the middle of nowhere.

Following a minor argument between the two brothers, Uncle Peter decides to take a drive into town, leaving Sarah and her father alone in the house together. It is then that Sarah begins hearing a whole assortment of creepy noises, from creaks and thuds to the blood-curdling sound of her father's scream. Soon enough, poor daddy is lying unconscious at the bottom of the stairs, and Sarah finds herself trapped inside the house on her lonely lonesome with a murderous intruder hot on her tail. But perhaps not all is as simple as it seems...

If you look at the poster for “Silent House,” you will see above Elizabeth Olsen’s shrieking expression the line, “Experience 88 minutes of real fear captured in real time.” This statement is true: “Silent House” does indeed develop in real time, with no flashbacks or flashforwards or any of the boring bits cut out from Sarah’s 88 minutes in and out of the house. The way this is achieved is interesting: you see, the filmmakers intend to give the impression that the film is shot in a single, unbroken take, in much the same way that the original film was, which is actually the primary reason for the attention it received.

However, much like the original, it quite clearly is not filmed in a single, unbroken take, the gimmick unfortunately spoiled in both films by a two-minute sequence arriving halfway through their runtimes in which the screen is entirely engulfed in pitch-black darkness, interrupted only by the occasional flashes of a polaroid camera. During these admittedly unnerving sequences, there could have very easily been a million cuts made, which completely undermines the central gimmick and leaves one wondering what on earth the point of it was.

I will say, though, that it does add a certain level of intensity to the production, we as an audience invited to experience the horrors of the story step-by-step along with our trembling, sniffle-nosed protagonist. It is also executed with much technical proficiency, our viewpoint starting off as an aerial shot, overlooking Rachel on the riverside, the camera then following her into the house, navigating its way through the various rooms of both floors, down to the basement, back outside again, then into a car, back inside the house, and back through the rooms. It’s all very impressive, although perhaps not as impressive as the camerawork of the original film; that one was, after all, filmed on a budget of $60,000, as opposed to the remake’s reported stash of $13 million.

Olsen gives a very effective central performance, a mercy, given that we are stuck by her side for the whole 88 minutes of the film. With the camera either in her face or even sitting on her shoulder for the overwhelming majority of the runtime, she performs with the same level of eye-popping skill she displayed in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” showcasing a wide range of emotions as a petrified girl running around a house in a blood-splattered tank top with a homicidal maniac ruthlessly pursuing her.

Still, Olsen’s majestic performance is not enough to save the film, which is marred by a laborious lack of narrative progression, and is little more than an overly extended shot of Miss Olsen tiptoeing her way through darkly lit rooms with her cleavage on display and a battery-powered lantern gripped between her fingers. I do believe it is superior to Hernández’s original film, thanks partly to some minor tweaking done to the earth-shattering bombshell that is the twist ending, but that still doesn’t mean it’s any good, nor any scary.

5/10