Silent House

Silent House is a movie that rides the line between an ability to be genuinely scary and falling into predictable non-scariness. Elizabeth Olsen plays Sarah, a young woman who has returned, with her father and uncle, to a disintegrating vacation home that they are trying to clean out, fix up and sell. Things take a wrong turn relatively quickly, though, after her uncle leaves to go get something in town. Sarah starts hearing noises, her father disappears, and she ends up locked in the house with an intruder, and the apparition of a little girl.

Silent House was a strange experience for me. Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, who play the Father and Uncle respectively, are not particularly good actors (or, at least, their skills don't show through in this film). Add to that the fact that Trese (the father) looks like he can't be more than ten years older than Sarah, and Stevens looks to be the same age as her. Olsen may only be in her early twenties, but she doesn't look it.

The film is done in one 80 minute (give or take) shot, and the break down of my enjoyment of the film kind of went like this - I was interested for about the first twenty minutes. Then, the next forty minutes, my interest waned to the point of me feeling like the movie was going to end predictably, and I would be leaving the theater upset, but the last twenty minutes ended up being a bit of a surprise, which redeemed the film from being a total waste of time and money.