SILENT HOUSE (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, 2011

Thrillers thrill us because they make us believe them — even if we probably shouldn’t. I didn’t really believe most of Silent House, even though there were reasons I wanted to.

It’s a contemporary variation on the “Old Dark House” lady-in-distress thriller, based on the Uruguayan suspense film La Casa Muda (by Gustavo Hernandez) and it stars the very pretty and convincing Elizabeth Olsen of Martha Marcy May Marlene, as Sarah, a sensitive and troubled young lady whose somewhat obnoxious father John (Adam Trese) and somewhat enigmatic Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) have joined her at the family’s summer home, to clean it up and prepare it for sale. Also briefly present is a fox-eyed young woman Sophia (played by Julia Taylor Ross) who claims to be one of Sarah’s best friends, though Sarah can’t remember her.

It’s an old dark house all right, even though the movie starts out in the light of day. The doors are locked and the windows boarded up, and the electricity is off — which means, I would think, that they ought to put off cleaning to another day, or at least find more battery-powered lighting, But like many another hapless citizen of horror-land, these people just keep plunging into darkness and more darkness, and finally chaos and mayhem take over. The men appear and disappear, Sarah keeps screaming and hiding under furniture, and we’re pretty sure Sophia will show up somewhere, along with a mysterious young girl and older man who are also lurking on the premises.

It’s not in the least plausible, though it has some surprises — implausible surprises. And some flashy technique. Silent House has been publicized in some quarters as having been made in a single continuous shot, which made it much more interesting to me — though it isn’t true. According to co-director/writer Laura Lau, as quoted by Film Noir Blonde, the movie was shot on a Canon 5 D camera in 13 separate shots, edited together to create the illusion of a single shot. It’s a pretty good illusion, although some of the cuts — the ones that take place, for instance, just after we’re suddenly plunged into darkness — seem pretty obvious. (Lau’s co-director, as he was in the deep sea shocker Open Water, is Chris Kentis, and the busy cinematographer is Igor Martinovic of Man on Wire.)

True, if you look at the Silent House credits in IMDB, there‘s no editor listed. But there is an editorial department, that names six editors working on the film, which would seem to indicate that somebody cut something — besides throats or torsos., or the severed limbs that seem more and more an ominous possibility the more Sarah wanders around through the dark house — in which she’s been locked with Papa John, Uncle Peter, assorted phantasm-looking folks, and something, human or not, that seems to wish her ill.

Now everyone has their weaknesses and I’m actually a sucker for cinematic long takes and extended camera shots, especially in the hands of a genius like Orson Welles (the opening bomb ticking bomb traveling shot in Touch of Evil, or the Amberson’s last ball in The Magnificent Ambersons) or Max Ophuls (the opening of Le Plaisir, Anton Walbrook’s tracking shot monolgue in La Ronde) or Alfred Hitchcock (all of Rope, which also has an illusory “one-shot,” and a lot of Under Capricorn).

Or the great Alexander Sokurov, who actually did shoot one of his films in only one take: the formidable single tracking shot moving inexorably along with our chatty guide, though the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, past walls full of paintings, halls full of statuary, up and down staircases and finally through a glittering grand concert and ball, with throngs of people maving toward the exits and the movie‘s end — a shot executed by the steadicam genius Tilman Butner in Sokurov’s masterpiece Russian Ark. This is for me the single greatest (most complex and most beautiful) single shot in the history of cinema. Watch the film sometime and see if you disagree.

The thirteen shots that make up the illusory one-take of Silent House, on the other hand, are much less of a tour de force. But they are an achievement, of sorts, and they do have their own hypnotics power. Shooting a scene in one take — whether it‘s the Ambersons ball (which the mutilating producers actually sliced up to “save time”) or the party scenes with the young killers Farley Granger and John Dall in Rope — or Robert Altman’s puckish opening one-take confabs in The Player, creates a tension that the audience doesn’t have to register or recognize to feel. For a critic, it cam become a showcase juggling act: How long can the movie keep those balls of emotion in the air, without dropping, or cutting? There’s tension in Silent House and it comes partly from the fact that we’re trapped in those shots, just as Sarah is trapped in the house.

On the other hand, why is she trapped? There’s an exlanation for Sarah’s bizarre predicament, but it doesn’t really kick in until the end, and even then it doesn’t really make much sense. Long unbroken shots in a film can have their own special beauty, but they suffer if the content of the shot, as here, is questionable or just plain uninteresting, If Silent House were actually a one-shot movie, I think I would have been impressed enough by the technical feat to grant it a little foolishness. But it kept me in the dark too long, and those thirteen shots didn’t add up to one great one.

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