Silent House disappoints despite technical mastery

If anything should set off warning lights, it’s a horror film based around a gimmick.

In a genre that already has a tendency to appear creatively anemic, a simple shakeup in presentation is one of the most viable ways to attract the attention of audiences. It’s at this point, though, that potential viewers should be the most wary.

Is the conceit of the movie indicative of greater inventive flourishes to come, as with the commercially and critically successful Paranormal Activity series? Or did the filmmakers have one lone spark of imagination and assume it could carry them all the way to success?

Silent House, from directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, belongs firmly in the latter camp.

From the opening shot onwards, the film progresses in real time over one continuous take, an ambitious undertaking that hopes to offset the very mundane setup: Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese) and her uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) have gathered to clean out their old lakeside retreat. The general air of unease quickly escalates into terror as vague, bad things start to happen in the dark.

Yes, that is the most general premise to a thriller ever devised, but a deep or complex storyline would have been nearly impossible to pull off in a movie that opts never to cut or edit what’s shot, so that can be excused. In truth, a fair amount of details are layered into the opening ten or fifteen minutes, and in a film like this, economy of information is an absolute necessity. Sure enough, whether its ultimate purpose is to foreshadow or misdirect, each scrap of information has a purpose.

That sounds like a compliment, and it would be if not for that fact that the eventual payoff is a deeply unsatisfying reveal. And the ending is one that feels like a betrayal of the implicit promise the film makes to the audience at the outset: that viewers will observe events depicted as they happen in real time.

The conclusion is such that this can’t possibly be the case, and ironically enough, the only thing that makes the story unique is what ultimately defeats it. If the movie were shot in almost any other way — save found footage a la the aforementioned Paranormal Activity films — it would be forgivable to employ a misleading visual representation of exactly how events transpire.   Here, that’s not the case.

The ending is far from the only problem, though, with Trese and Sheffer’s performances as the father and uncle each earning a fair amount of chuckles for awkward, stilted delivery — only some of which was intentional. Then there’s the fact that one can practically tally the banal motifs — from the eerie little girl to the bloody bathroom scares to the inexplicable willingness of characters to split up.  It all culminates in a final ten minutes that drowns the film in every overdone cliché that the words “psychological thriller” might bring to mind.

It’s a shame, really, because there was tremendous potential here. Elizabeth Olsen, is, for the most part, phenomenal. She completely sells every ounce of her terror; her mouthed, soundless screams in particular cause almost physical discomfort to behold. The simple fact that she keeps it up for so long and manages to build the tension through her performance is commendable.  She gives it her all for a final product completely unworthy of her level of dedication.

And though it’s most certainly nothing more than a gimmick, here the technical proficiency of the film also deserves recognition simply for the deft camerawork necessary to pull off a movie like this at all, even with the possibility that many takes were actually stitched together to create the appearance of one seamless shot.

Yet it’s all for naught. Anyone hoping for a scary, satisfying little ride should look elsewhere; Silent House provides nothing more than a couple of jumps before invalidating itself completely in the last few minutes.