In my experience, horror movie audiences are among both the most open and yet also unforgiving. They’re willing to attend almost any film in the genre in search of a good scare, with an instinctive understanding of how a low-rent, star-free experiment can be just as rewarding as a slicker counterpart, if not more. Yet, many public screenings of horror movies end with a chorus of boos.
Sometimes these jeers are deserved (William Brent Bell’s The Devil Inside certainly earned viewers’ ire), but sometimes these reactions display an almost willful ignorance of how the genre works. By design, horror films tend to leave their narrative doors open, either for more scares in your head or for direct sequels down the road. A few end with ludicrous twists.
Granted, this leaves a sad lack of options for horror filmmakers. Many of them, trying to leave their options open, paint themselves into corners instead. For example, the new horror film Silent House has such a starkly simple premise – the menacing of a young woman at her old family house, rendered in a single continuous camera take – that its narrative options are limited: the girl gets killed, the girl gets away, or there’s an unexpected plot twist.
Before Silent House reaches those crossroads, it’s an effective piece of gimmickry. Remade from the 2010 Uruguayan film La Casa Muda, written, directed, and edited by Gustavo Hernández, the American version of Silent House was almost certainly not shot in a single take; there are a few key points where invisible edits could have been fudged over. But its simulation is more or less seamless and does the job of sparing its viewers the relief of a cut.
This uncut shot never strays far from Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), following her as she arrives home to help her father (Adam Trese) and Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) clean up the place for sale. After establishing the house’s horror bona fides – it’s old, it creaks, and its windows are boarded up, letting in little light – Silent House teases Sarah with strange noises. She almost seems to sense that she’s in a horror film, and Olsen, no stranger to performing terror after Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, plays her as smart, if unprepared for the genre wringer.
Sarah eventually finds herself trapped in the house, hearing and glimpsing strange figures that go about their business with an eerie lack of urgency. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, adept at conveying fear in 2003’s Open Water, make savvy use of shallow focus here, racking between foreground and background to keep viewers off balance and unaware of what lurks just outside their field of vision.
As Silent House adopts some of the language of recent found-footage horror movies, with handheld camerawork and limited point of view, its one-take effect seems almost old-fashioned. Yet, Lau and Kentis build the film’s scariness better than many horror movie makers, generating suspense in scenes of running and hiding, as well as some meta-suspense over whether Silent House will turn into a home-invasion shocker, a ghost story, or something else entirely. But tension alone can’t sustain a film, even a horror film. Some manner of conclusion must be reached.
Silent House finds its ending, though not after dropping some clues (first cryptic, then increasingly obvious) and overstaying its welcome with ten minutes too many of Sarah sneaking around the house, hearing scary noises, and hiding under things. I’m not sure if audiences will boo the final minutes of Silent House or if the filmmakers achieve that magical, apparently elusive surprise craved by horror fans. To discuss those moments further would spoil its drawn-out creepiness.
I can say, though, that Silent House spoils some of that creepiness, placing a shaky narrative gimmick on top of its relatively sound filmmaking trick. It doesn’t come to a ridiculous conclusion (it plays about as fair as it can, given the circumstances) as much as it fizzles out after a long build-up. Kentis and Lau deserve credit for not repeating the overriding doom of Open Water and approaching the genre from a different angle. For a while of its running time, Silent House is a superior scare machine. If only it went a little farther.