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"Silent" Fright

Here's the deal with "Silent House", a lo-fi thriller that debuted at last year's Sundance Festival and received wide release this past Friday: it's just under an hour and a half long, and it's presented, more or less, as a single take. If that intrigues you, keep reading. If not, it's probably best to move along.

The plot of "Silent House", such as it is, concerns a father and daughter who are cleaning out the family's slowly crumbling lake house in preparation for selling it. The house has obviously been empty for some time, and vandals and squatters have taken their toll: the large windows are all boarded up, giving the appearance of blindness. There's no electricity, so the only interior illumination comes from a collection of dusty camping lanterns or the occasional handheld flashlight. Detritus litters many of the rooms, and plastic sheeting drapes the walls. In one early scene, a major mold infestation is discovered in the basement. That's right, the old family home is literally rotten to the core. Viewers on the lookout for overarching themes and metaphors may want to take note.

The daughter, Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), wanders the house while her father and uncle work on assessing the damage. Sarah answers a knock at the door and encounters a young woman claiming to be her childhood playmate. But Sarah can't remember her; she admits that she seems to have "holes in her memory". Shortly afterward, back in the ever-darker house, Sarah loses track of her father and falls prey to her fear that there is an intruder stalking the upstairs rooms. After a panicked search she finds her father, wounded, in a pool of blood. This would certainly seem to support the intruder theory. The back half of the film involves Sarah's attempts to get out of the house - remember, the windows are boarded up, and the keys she digs out of various drawers don't seem to fit any of the padlocks keeping the doors shut - and to dodge the hulking, shadowy figure that appears behind her at random intervals. Several tense encounters later, she's finally forced to confront the ugly family mystery lurking at the heart of the decaying house.

Filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau liked the single-take approach for "Silent House" because they wanted the scares to be generated organically from the story, rather than being trumped up via editing. Watching the film's events unfold in real time does make the viewer aware of how exhaustingly over-edited most current Hollywood product is. However, the pacing of "Silent House" also argues persuasively for the need for editing as the engine that provides storytelling momentum in a visual medium. Without those edits to push the pace, it falls to actress Elizabeth Olsen's lead performance to give the story tension and energy. While she is more than up to that task, Ms. Olsen is unfortunately put in the position of having to act and react at such a pitch that some of her choices will look like overacting - and that's not a fair assessment of either her talent or her willingness to fully commit to the acting choices that this production calls for.

"Silent House" isn't a bad piece of work, but it doesn't really live up to its hype. Or, to put it more accurately, the film's marketing campaign misrepresents the material - and because of that, it's going to bear the brunt of the audience's disappointed expectations. The promotional trailers all framed a pretty straight-ahead horror movie, and that's not really the experience that "Silent House" provides. Moreover, typical audiences either aren't going to notice the film's single-take structure, or they won't care about the nuance of it or about the filmmakers' justifiable choice in presenting the story in that manner. Finally, unsuspecting viewers may object to the ugly turn that the film takes in the final act; let's just say that Mr. Kentis and Ms. Lau succeed in their aim of generating horror from their story and not from the edits. Mainstream moviegoers, you have been warned.