Review: Silent House

The movie, Silent House by Chris Kentis, is a psychological thriller based on an Uruguayan horror movie called, "La Casa Muda." Chris Kentis' previous work includes the hit movie Open Water. The whole movie is one continuous cut and shot from a POV, similar to Chronicle and Cloverfield. If you get motion sickness easily, I do not recommend you watch this movie. The camera is constantly shaking and moving. Despite all the camera movements, you feel the tension and emotion that Elizabeth Olsen feels in her position.

The setting of this movie is a cluttered, summer house looking over a lake. The movie opens with a girl (Olsen), her father and uncle cleaning out the house. Olsen hears little creaks and all those other scary noises you think about when you're home alone. But Olsen, her father and her uncle aren't the only ones there. Olsen ends up by herself in the house and ends up getting chased by someone unknown man. She sprints up stairs and locks herself in a room. These events eventually lead up to her finding her father's body in a pool of blood. Olsen goes back downstairs and outside the house to find her uncle, but when they go back upstairs to find her father's body, it's gone. She splits up with her uncle for a little and then gunshots are heard throughout the house. Hiding under the table, again, she sees her uncle's body being dragged across the ground by the unknown man (or woman). After she witnesses this horrifying sight for herself, she comes out from under the table and a twist in the story takes place. At this point, the audience should have realized she has a psychological problem and that Olsen was imagining everything that occurred. According to pictures shown, she was molested by her uncle and father as a child in that house. So this was Olsen's revenge on her uncle and father. She was the one who shot her uncle and beat her father to death.

Okay, so the ending kind of ruined the movie for the audience. Olsen mutilates her father with a sledgehammer and walks off screen, nothing said. The storyline overall was not too complex to follow until the last 5-10 minutes comes. That when the audience has to use their brains to put it all together. Which ties together with other little foreshadows and hints from earlier in the movie. Personally, I feel they could have chosen a better cast. The actor who played Olsen's father looked as if she could've been a husband or brother which made it seem awkward when she called him, "Daddy." The "eerie" soundtrack goes relatively well with the theme of the movie. The only thing about it is that I feel it is a little too subtle. A detail that is really subtle that no one seems to notice is that every few minutes, random spurts of blood start to show up on Olsen's shirt with no reason for it. The plot in one sentence should go something like this: A young woman is terrorized by an unknown man while cleaning out her old Summer house that ends with a twist. Overall this movie probably deserves a C-, but fact that some of scenes made me wanna crap my pants, I give it a C+.

Link to trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD88EFBFuos