Rated R and 85 minutes long, “Silent House” debuted in 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in theatres on March 9, 2012. Directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, the cast includes Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens, Julia Taylor Ross, Adam Barnett and Haley Murphy.
The movie has a simple, but gripping plot. It begins with a young woman, Sarah, who’s helping her father and uncle clean up an old family vacation home. The house, which is vacant most of the time, has been the target of local vandals and squatters, and the family plans to sell the house to get it off their hands.
To keep vandals from breaking out any more windows, the family has nailed plywood over the windows and the electricity’s out because a rat’s chewed through a wire somewhere in the house. In other words, even in broad daylight, the interior of the house is pitch black, giving it a creepy, haunted house vibe that adds a lot to the movie.
Things begin to go sideways when Sarah meets another young woman who claims to have been her childhood friend. They talk for a few minutes out on the front porch, and Sarah doesn’t remember ever having met her. After this strange young woman leaves, Sarah begins to hear strange noises upstairs. Sarah later finds her unconscious father with a nasty head wound and also discovers that she’s locked inside the house with an unknown third party.
Her uncle, who left after an earlier argument with Sarah’s father, returns. He attempts to discover who else is in the house, but he also goes missing. Right up until the end, you’re left on the edge of your seat trying to figure out who’s causing all the trouble. Who ever the culprit is, they’re tough enough to get the upper hand on two grown men who look like they’d be able to handle themselves.
One of the things that made this movie cool was that it was shot so as to make the events in the film seem like they were happening in real time. The action seemed seamless as if it was filmed as one continuous shot. I thought that aspect of the movie was especially well done.
I was also interested to learn that this movie was a remake of a Spanish language movie called “La casa muda,” which means “The Silent House.” Supposedly, “La casa muda” was based on real events that occurred sometime in the 1940s, but I read somewhere that no evidence has ever been found to back up this claim.
In the end, how many of you have seen “Silent House”? What did you think about it? Did you like it or not? Let us know in the comments section below.
For more information about “Silent House,” visit the film’s official Web site at www.whyisthishappeningtome.net.
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