A 'House' Not Worth Buying

by Brett Parker

I’m about to give away the ending to Silent House. I always try to avoid big spoilers, but I’d like to use my review to point out something that kind of bugs me. So if you’re curious to see this film and don’t want a yahoo like me ruining that experience for you, turn back now! Anyways, here it goes: screenwriters, lets put the brakes on employing that tiresome “twist” ending where “the entire movie took place inside the protagonist’s head, who’s revealed to be psychotic. That means everything that transpired before the ending was a delusion that never actually happened.” Not only is such a development sneakily contrived and very hard-to-pull-off, but its not even terribly original these days, seeing as how Martin Scorsese pretty much retired the prize with Shutter Island. Not to mention, tacking on such an ending is an insult to the memory of Donald Kaufman.

Things started so promisingly here, too. As the film opens, we see a young lady named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) standing by a lake in front of her family’s summer home. She is spending the day with her father, John (Adam Trese) and Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) as they all help to clean up the house and sell it. The house is boarded up on the inside and makes everything seem dark and ominous from within. Pretty soon, Peter storms out after an argument with John, leaving Sarah and her father left to clean the house themselves.

While Sarah works to clean things up on the downstairs level of the house, she hears a loud noise upstairs and discovers that someone (or something) has apparently knocked John violently unconscious. Pretty soon, Sarah realizes she’s not alone in the house and that obscure bodies are moving throughout the shadows, trying to find her and potentially harm her. With the front and back doors of the house locked up tightly and the window boards casting the entire house in blinding darkness, Sarah must duck in closets and use whatever light sources she can to try and break out of the house, find safety for her Dad, and discover who (or what) is wreaking havoc on the house.

Directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (the team behind Open Water) trick the camera and the editing into appearing as if the entire film is a one-take realtime sequence. While it may not be exactly that (the film secretly edits together a string of long, uninterrupted stretches), the final effect is still impressive. One advantage of this technique is how it allows us to discover each jolting scare as Sarah does, making her terror of what cannot be seen our own. While this film doesn’t employ the gambit of a found-footage flick, it certainly looks like one with the shaky camera that constantly peaks over Sarah’s shoulder, making us feel exactly what its like to be standing there and experiencing horrific events. One perk of this increasingly popular style of filmmaking is the way it brings an immediate intimacy to generic film matters. Indeed, if Silent House were made with classical editing and camera techniques, it would probably be revealed to be the tired and preposterous genre flick it truly is. It’d probably turn out to be more coherent in its plot, though.

We should consider ourselves lucky that we have Elizabeth Olsen to guide us through these scary waters. With this and her last film, the endlessly-creepy Martha Marcy May Marlene, Olsen has pretty much cornered the market on playing frazzled and mortified young victims. She has an inherent gift for teleporting genuine emotions of utter fear and panic in a way that puts most scream queens to shame. Indeed, she hits all the bases of this haunted house experience with a startling rawness that the film is absolutely undeserving of. I was especially impressed by the way she quietly freaks out under a table while hiding from an unseen threat. Going the emotional distance and then some for generic trifle is the mark of a good actress. Nathan Fillion once said that he could cry his eyes out at the drop of a hat. I wonder if Olson could turn on her urgent terror face with the same speed. That’d be especially fun at parties or something.

So the tension and scares are pretty consistent as the film rolls along, but then the ending shows up and its explanation of events (or lack thereof, rather) proves to be vague and underwhelming. So the film tries to explain how most of what we just saw was one big delusion, but why everything was a big delusion is what I have a problem with. The film expects us to pay attention to early background details that, for the life of us, we didn’t terribly notice in the first place. Call me old fashioned, but a good twist ending usually relies on an intelligible exposition, which is exactly what I feel this film is lacking. The film wants to be a clever meditation on traumatic sexual repressions but it all feels like too much of a horror gimmick to me. For what its worth, at one point I thought the unseen threat would turn out to be psychotic squatters hiding out in the summer home (a suspicion I picked up from a shot of a bed in a basement and a throwaway line from Uncle Peter) and that, to me, would’ve made the movie ten times better. Not only would it be a shrewd commentary on privilege anxieties amidst these tough economical times, but it’d probably give The Strangers a run for its money.

Elizabeth Olsen as a horror heroine and a real-time “one take” fluidity sounds like such a recipe for surefire horror success that its rather dumbfounding that Silent House takes such damaging stumbles in its last act. But alas, this flick is another disheartening example of how a bad ending can ruin an entire movie. However, the ending left me with one deep thought: one day, I’d like to see a real life psychologist write a horror script where the entire movie takes place inside the hero’s mind. It’d be interesting to see what all those other scary films with that gimmick were missing.