Silent House (2011)

the audience applauded

From my favorite movies..

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This film honestly did take me by surprise. Silent House was well acted, and well shot. The actors, including Olsen, all performed very well in this movie. This movie is affective when it comes to being scary and giving the audience members chills, I know it did for me. There really isn't any background music or anything, which was probably the most effective part of the movie when it comes to being scary. The plot summary for silent house was pretty intricate and unique, never really seen a plot like this one before. This movie has very cool twists and turns, especially towards the ending, and to be honest, they made the film. This movie was very enjoyable and is a cool flick for horror movie fans. Some scenes did drag just a bit, but not much, and once you got through them, things sped up again and got back on track. Overall, I give Silent House a 7/10.

The Hollywood adaptation of the 2010 Uruguayan horror film La casa muda, Silent House is a shot-for-shot remake that even applies the same technical gimmick of the original in order to advertise itself as a film shot in one continuous take and while there are a couple of new elements added in the story, it fails to rectify the biggest plot hole of its source material.The story of Silent House follows Sarah, a young woman who's at her family vacation house with her father & uncle and is helping them clean the property and make it ready for sale. While her uncle is out for an errand, she hears strange noises, followed by an attack on her father after which she attempts to get out of the house but finds herself trapped inside and terrorised by a possible intruder.Written, co-produced & co-directed by Laura Lau, with added directional effort coming from Chris Kentis, Silent House is quite a tedious film to sit through considering that I've already seen the original and while that film suffered from numerous shortcomings of its own, what sucks about Silent House is that it ends up making the very same mistakes all over again as if no one cared to question the whole absurdity of its major plot twist.The images captured by its ever-moving camera is edited to give the illusion of an unbroken take from start to finish but the gimmick fails to add or elevate the tension. At 87 minutes, the film still feels a tad too long as only one thing keeps happening in the whole movie. The only effort comes from Elizabeth Olsen who carries the whole film on her own & tries to do whatever she can but unfortunately Olsen doesn't have enough material to work with here.On an overall scale, Silent House is an unnecessary remake of an already mediocre original that fails to take the advantage of the opportunity it had to improve on the shortcomings of that Uruguayan chiller. The scares are quite predictable, that major plot twist in the final act is as illogical as before, its one shot technique is quite useless, it is longer than it needs to be, and is barely held together by Olsen's committed performance. Another addition in the long list of pathetic remakes churned out by Hollywood, Silent House is worth skipping.

Arriving to clean up a remote house, a woman and her father find themselves stalked by ghostly figures and voices throughout the house as they attempt to escape and try to find the cause of the incidents before they continue to get worse.This was a pretty disappointing and barely decent entry here. What really gets this one going for the most part is the fact that there's an admittedly decent and enjoyable mystery here in the first half about what is actually happening in the house with the group, as this one really banks on mysterious noises, creepy shots of people walking in the background just out of viewpoint and the fun of disappearing bodies that seem to move about on their own that really makes for quite a fun time here as the disorienting reality this sets up is wholly appealing and thrilling. Many of these early scenes come off the best as there's just no shortage of fun, thrilling moments as her attempts to elude the stalking figure in the background and the rather strong manner in which the film builds this up through the single-take gimmick where it really feels like an escalation of the stalking as the figure gets closer and closer and her efforts are all in vain as there's the attacks on her father and uncle that cause this one to really get stronger with some even better scenes in here. Still, there's some pretty big flaws here as there's way too many flaws here that are detrimental and one even cripples it outright. The most crippling part here is indeed the finale twist, which is plainly obvious, twists around the action already featured for no reason and comes off as wholly unappealing here as the drop-off from the ghostly haunting into the type of more human-like twist employed here doesn't do the film any favors and just appears as a way to fool the audience. As well, the fact that this all appears as one continuous take doesn't make for anything all that interesting as being forced to employ the same type of scares all throughout here as this one can only employ those specific type of set-ups with the central gimmick in play makes for quite a bland time here as all the shots are the same blurred and out-of-focus scenes that are brought up here. As well, the other flaw here is the fact that this one never really manages to put into light why there was a haunting in the first place as this one easily could've been ignored had there been something about what's going on instead of continually throwing her family back into danger. These big flaws here bring this one down significantly.Rated R: Violence, Language and strong themes of incest and child abuse.

Silent House - a film about a woman who wanders round one room inside a house after the next. Sometimes she makes a phone call. Sometimes she leaves a message on someone's answer phone. Once she even spoke to someone via a webcam. Then, every now and again, something 'spooky' happens. It could be that something falls over, something invisible pokes her or something equally as 'seen-it-all-before.' Silent House is pretty dull. Its one plus point is that it's short. People turn up, act a bit creepy, don't really give much away and leave. There's something like a 'reveal' at the end, but, by the time it actually happens, I doubt there will be enough people still interested in the film to care.Seriously, don't bother. There are a million better and scarier horror films out there.