SILENT HOUSE is more than the one-trick-pony its gimmick might suggest. The gimmick is that its 88 minutes of running time are one continuous take. The more is that the filmmakers make it an integral part of the story of a family trip to the eponymous building that turns deadly.
Sherlock Holmes once opined that a house sitting in the middle of a rural nowhere was more menacing to him than anything to be found in the midst of a teeming city. What could not be visited upon someone in such isolation, and who would be there to help? Such is the case that Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and her Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) discover after spending a few days packing up their
ramshackle and very old vacation home. Long abused by transients and squatters. The windows, all broken by the intruders, are boarded up. The electricity is out, and there is mold everywhere. All of which puts out Papa, who is more snappish than usual with his brother, and curt with Sarah. An unexpected meeting with a forgotten childhood friend (Julia Taylor Ross) allows a few other salient plot points to be added. Those would be that there is no cell phone reception, the land lines are out, and that Sarah is not at all sure she knows this pleasant girl who seems to know Sarah very well.
Perfect setting. Dark old house, no communication, and one other element that makes it all come together. The locks are old-fashioned, needing a key no matter which side of the door one uses. Once Uncle Peter drives off in a huff, Sarah and her father are left in that vulnerability of isolation, and the strange noises that old houses make, particularly ones that are dark inside, become more than odd, they become ominous.
Part of the conceit of one continuous shot is that the story is also told in real time and from Sarahs point of view. Disoriented, terrified, it is as much the close-ups of Olsens hyperaware, painfully young face that create almost unbearable levels of suspense as the superb sound design, that takes the tiniest creak and makes it the stuff of nightmares. Trapped in the house, permitted only the briefest of glimpses of a large and looming figure that is maddeningly out of focus, Sarahs gulping breaths and Olsens keen sense of evoking a terror too great for anything but silence, create the perfect atmosphere of refined yet primal horror. Her scene of fumbling as Sarah tries to get a key in a lock is perfection itself balancing focused determination and shaking terror made all the more so with measured camera work that is steady where Sarah is not. So absolute is the sense of overall dread throughout that shining the feeble light of a work lamp into the darkness is scarier than leaving the darkness in peace to conceal the bogey man.
SILENT HOUSE begins like any well-crafted slasher flick but soon reveals itself to be operating on a whole other level, one that is a delightful surprise. It does nothing to mitigate the high-tension of the opening, instead upping the ante by introducing new elements that, seen in retrospect, were there all along, not unlike that bogey man in the dark. They are also in keeping with the films most deeply terrifying theme, that of complete loss of control over ones life and person.
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