Film Review - SILENT HOUSE ★★☆☆☆

In Silent House, the camera lens almost never veers off of its star Elizabeth Olsen, who gave a breakout performance in last year’s Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s a commanding one woman hide-and- seek show here for Olsen, and you can cut the tension with a knife as the constantly roving camera follows her every waking action in an attempt to escape whomever or whatever lurks in the dark.

Olsen plays Sarah, who upon returning to her childhood summer residence along with her father and (at times creepy) uncle, fall victim to a mysterious and deadly presence in the remote house. Is it home invasion? Supernatural forces at work? Or both? Those eerie questions linger throughout the film once the big spooks kick in. It also goes without saying that the isolated lake house has tightly boarded up windows, intermittent electricity courtesy of a finicky gasoline generator, and obviously is located well out of range for clean cell phone service.

The film, from the director duo of Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (who also helmed 2003's trapped-at-sea thriller Open Water), has a marketing angle touting it as a one-take movie. The other angle that leans on Silent House's entire 88 minute run taking place in 'real time' with "every minute as one terrifying sequence" would be the more accurate description.

On the tech side, you would be hard pressed to start a camera rolling on a feature length film and somehow never need to stop for even a single on-set gaffe that ruins a precious take. It’s not to say that the events in Silent House do not appear to occur in one continuous tension building shot, but diverting your attention away from the film itself in an attempt to catch the clever camera moves and edit points that allowed the production crew to grab several breathers on the set would be a mistake. Save that for a second viewing on home video, and you are better off keeping an eye on the film’s star.

The crafty handheld camerawork, although masterfully choreographed to a tee in order to capture all the necessary nuances of the script in a series of long takes, unfortunately creeps the feel of the film into the “found footage” territory, a genre that is growing thin rapidly. Last year's Insidious was a horror film that brilliantly utilized old fashioned scares, camera angles, booming sudden sound design, and scant gore all neatly wrapped up in a low budget PG-13 package. The real time shooting gimmick here doesn’t allow for those old school scares in the same manner, as the entire film falls solely on what Sarah sees and hears.

But when frenzied scenes take place in complete darkness, and the audience has been offered little sense of the layout of the isolated enclosed environment, Silent House hits the right marks. But conveying the true weight of the terror in the house lies predominantly on Olsen's shoulders.

Unlike her subtle disturbing turn in Martha Marcy May Marlene, here she screams, shrieks, runs, hides, and breathes heavy for most of the film as we wait to finally see what exactly the hell is going on in the shadows. Olsen's performance and the technical merits of the film keep the tension and claustrophobic atmosphere at the forefront, but the few hints we get along the way as to what is truly behind the terror end up taking away the hope of a logistical conclusion.

Like most horror thrillers, the final reveal after endless build up can make or break the time you have invested watching the film. I won’t reveal any plot points steering you in the direction it heads into (though as a remake of the Uruguayan film La Casa Muda, you are free to look up potential spoilers at your own risk). When the dust settles and the lights come back on, Silent House rides too many abstract angles and then mashes them into one take-it-or-leave-it explanation, which leaves it up to the viewer to accept it as a satisfying answer to it all.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆