Elizabeth Olsen Takes Misguided Trip to ‘Silent House’

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

Rating: 2.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Elizabeth Olsen does her damned best to save “Silent House” from itself but this quasi-thriller collapses under the weight of a script that just doesn’t work. It’s one of those horror movies with no internal logic and camera tricks as ways to heighten tension instead of anything that feels remotely genuine. The trip through “Silent House” starts promisingly but you’ll be running for the doors before it ends.

The trick behind “Silent House” is a relatively clever one. The story is told in one take, never leaving the location of its female protagonist, a clearly troubled girl named Sarah (Olsen) who is helping pack up an old house with her father John (Adam Trese) and her uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens). There are some obvious cuts (like when it gets pitch black, door transitions, or running scenes) but the film is an impressive technical accomplishment until one realizes that it’s almost all style and no substance. When “Silent House” is over, ask yourself if it would have worked without the one-shot trick. The answer is no and the film needed to exist on its own as a strong horror thriller and then had the technique employed to amplify its themes instead of the other way around.

Silent House
Photo credit: Open Road

After a long set-up that feels designed to basically just stretch the running time instead of actually enhancing the mood (Ti West knows how to do “slow burn” with his films like “House of the Devil” and “The Innkeepers”…this is more like “delayed start”), Sarah hears a knock at the door and meets a mysterious girl named Sophia (Julia Taylor Ross) who claims to have known her as a child. The two have an unusual conversation and promise to meet up later. When Sarah goes back inside, she hears a noise upstairs when she knows her dad isn’t up there. Since this is a vacation home that is about to be sold, the house has been heavily boarded up and padlocked to avoid squatters, adding to the sense of claustrophobia.

Sarah and her father slowly travel upstairs with lanterns (there’s no electricity either) to investigate. They don’t hear anything but John finds some Polaroids that startle him. He quickly hides them and Sarah goes to her room to start packing. She hears dad walk down the hall and then a loud sound like a body hitting the floor. This is the most effective moment in the film as we only know what Sarah does at this moment – she’s already scared from what came before and now this loud sound. She hesitantly leaves and tries to figure what’s going on. Before long, she’s being hunted by what first seems like a “Strangers”-esque home invasion but soon becomes something much more unusual.

Is Sarah being threatened by squatters? Attacked by an ex-boyfriend? Haunted by Rosemary’s Baby? All of the above? The first act of “Silent House” is relatively effective but as with a lot of movies like this it becomes less interesting as the questions pile up and the answers don’t satisfy. It’s easy to write and direct a scene in which a damsel in distress hears a creepy sound in a house that should be empty. What matters is how the film plays out when she goes to investigate and “Silent House” gets the set-up but fumbles the follow-through.

Silent House
Photo credit: Open Road

Part of the problem is in the gimmick, which becomes repetitive and misguided. The film is actually rarely shot from Sarah’s actual perspective (except for that great initial sound, in which Chris Kentis & Laura Lau’s camera brilliantly tracks dad via noise walking in the other room). No, the film is most often shot staring directly at Sarah/Olsen. So, we often see her response to something before we see the actual something. It creates a jarring effect that was probably intended but nonetheless grows grating and annoying. It would have been truly daring to attempt “Silent House” like “Enter the Void” and film the whole piece from Sarah’s P.O.V. but they could have at least provided a few more over-the-shoulder scares. The decision to focus the camera on Sarah instead of the world around her too often makes for a film with no real sense of danger other than the fear on the face of a girl with clearly serious issues before this night.

Someone probably asked if a horror film would be as effective if we focused on the response of the victim more than what she was responding to – the answer is not really. Way more often than you might expect, Kentis & Lau barely even show the viewer what has terrified Sarah so completely, making it impossible to get into her shoes and allowing the fear to drain from the piece. It places all of the dramatic weight on Olsen’s shoulders. She does an admirable job but she’s forced into a situation where she has to try to differentiate between being scared hiding under a table, hiding in a basement, and hiding in a car. The differences are minimal and we long for a moment away from her not to break the non-existent tension as the filmmakers hoped but just for the sake of variety.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com [email protected]