I feel that before I begin I should probably say that this contains a major spoiler and so those who have not yet endured this film may not want to continue. Although, I personally think that it was the director and scriptwriters who ‘spoiled’ this movie! I honestly believe that it could have been good, sadly however, it failed on all accounts (in my humble opinion).
Being somewhat of a horror fanatic, it gets increasingly harder to find something original within the genre, and when I first heard about The Silent House, I thought that it had potential to defy the cliches and sterotypes, and maybe offer a unique experience. The only reason that I was drawn to this movie was because it claimed to be filmed in one single shot, which – naive as I am – I initially took to be true. Of course, in hindsight this was an absurd publicity stunt to lure in the gullible, because obviously more than one shot was used, but the edits were just cleverly hidden. There’s no more secrets left in the film industry, I’m afraid! This inital lie aside, I thought it was an interesting concept, and so was eager to see how it turned out.
It was only midway through the film that it started to dawn on me that it really would take an extraordinary actress to be able to pretty much carry an entire movie herself – which unfortunately, she (Florencia Colucci) was not. There’s only so much of running around in the dark, screaming that one can take before one starts to get immensely bored of the whole thing, expecially with no editing to liven things up a little bit! Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all up for a dark and dismal film – if anything, I expect that from a horror film, but there comes a point where visually, things are too dark. It’s pointless making it so dark that the audience cannot actually see what is happening in some scenes. And no, it’s not ‘evoking the characters sense of desperation and loneliness’, its bad cinematography and the only thing its evoking is the viewer’s fustration. Many a horror movie has fallen foul of this fundamental aspect of filmmaking, and it just astounds me that they couldn’t spare a few pounds (or pesos in the case of The Silent House) of their budget on a little bit of lighting.
But, what really was the straw that broke the camels back was the fact that they went for the ole ‘it was her doing it all along’ ending. This may have been innovative and edgy at some point, but it really has been done to death (literally, in many cases!). I thought the ending completely ruined any morsel of goodness that the film had managed to maintain, as it basically destroyed the integrity of everything the film stood for! The tagline for the film was ‘Real Fear in Real Time’, suggesting that the viewer is witnessing all of these events as they are happening, but we reach the end and what do we fin? What we’ve in fact been watching has all been lies, meaning we’ve wasted 90 minutes of our lives.
Then I heard that the Americans want to do a remake of it and my first reaction was: typical! When don’t they want to remake something? But, they would be hard pressed to actually make this any worse, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. However, upon seeing it, it seemed to have exactly the same pitfalls as the original! Although, I must confess, the lighting was passable; (but you know things are bad when a film review starts talking about the lighting).
Ultimately, I think the error of both these films was that too much emphasis was placed on the gimmick of shooting the film as one continuous shot. This does have novelty value – hey, it was the reason I watched in the first place – but audiences don’t generally care about how a film is made, especially if it means compromising on the story and content of the film (as The Silent House did). The film ended up being really rather dull to watch, all in all, but if you are new to the horror genre and want a tame ride, then I guess this film could fit that bill. It’s not at all complicated to understand the plot (mainly because there isn’t really one!) so it’s very easy to watch but perhaps bring a friend along to chat to during the drawn out scenes of running and crying.
