The recent trend of ultra-haunted house films trudges on once more with Chris Kentis’ film, “Silent House.”
The remake of a 2010 Uruguayan movie of the same name throws viewers into the middle of a family’s renovation project of their mostly-abandoned lake side house.
The perspective of the film is that of a young adult woman named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen). Olsen is the sister and exact replica of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. While Sarah’s dad, John (Adam Trese), and her uncle, Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens), bicker as they complete the brunt of the hard labor in the boarded-up shack, Sarah helps by wandering around oddly with candles and trying to remember her childhood at their summer retreat, to no avail.
From there, the story advances to the “scary” part. John seemingly disappears, presumably working, and Peter leaves in his truck while a skittish Sarah pokes around her old room. The obligatory horror film’s lengths of silence, shattered by unexplained crashes and booms in adjacent rooms, make for a thick tenseness in the film that lingers for longer than necessary. It’s a cheap trick that relies more on the stress of the viewer than a genuinely scary story.
Eventually, after seeing figures of people appearing to chase her, Sarah stumbles across her father’s almost-dead body in the attic, complete with bloody head wound.
“What have they done to you?” Sara sobs, referring to God-knows-who — or what — “they” are.
The majority of the movie is spent chronicling Sarah’s failed attempts to break through the plywood that obstructs the house’s windows in effort to seek help.
What Olsen does well is portray the scattered emotions of someone being eaten alive by a creepy old house.
Audiences root for her to find an escape or a key to any one of the house’s padlocks that were stupidly put on every exit to prevent squatters, leaving her no clear escape.
The unexplained spooky elements grow old fast, though. Moviegoers who want a quick explanation for loud noises or scary shadows will be shut down. This film fails to elaborate on anything while tossing in more elements, making major “What the heck?” moments that perplex and frustrate.
Finally, Sarah breaks out of the house while the creepy entity is right on her tail, stumbling and choking on her own breath as the sickeningly-shaky camera blurs in-and-out of focus, leaving viewers nauseous and, again, frustrated. She finds her way to a road where she is almost hit by her uncle’s truck as she stares at an oddly-placed, creepy little girl in a white dress. This, of course, is absurdly typical for a haunted house movie.
After getting into Peter’s truck and trying to explain everything that has happened in his terribly inconvenient absence, Sarah calms down long enough for him to insist that they thrust themselves back into the danger by venturing back in to the house to find John.
With nothing more than a handgun to protect them from the “beings” that linger in the dark of the house, the two unsuccessfully search for John until Sarah turns away long enough for Peter to become victim, too. She begins to see the predators more clearer than ever and studies them as they victimize her uncle and father’s bodies, but not her.
The final act of the movie puts together most of the pieces of the mystery while adding a few more, just before offering a solution to all of the film’s occurrences that essentially undoes everything remotely scary about the plot.
Endlessly typical and striving to shock viewers with the final explanation after one-hour-and-28-minutes of messy storytelling, this film fails to impress, leaving only the wasted cost of a movie ticket to haunt viewers long after they’ve headed home.
