Review of The Silent House (2010) by Dan T — 30 Jun 2011

When I first saw the trailer to The Silent House I was pretty excited. Supposedly the entire movie was done in one shot. I can't say if that is entirely true, but I can say that it definitely looked that way. There was not a single cut on the entire movie. Or at least a noticeable one. Only when the movie is pitch black could I possibly believe it was cut.

The movie is about daughter and father that are staying the night at a house, which does not happen to have electricity, and bad things happen!

The thing that The Silent House has going for it, outside of how brilliantly it is filmed, is the setting. The house that they are in is beyond creepy and you truly feel immersed due to its haunting atmosphere and how well its filmed.

But unfortunately it suffers from a wide array of problems. The pacing is unexceptionally slow at times. For it's 80 min run time, I'd say about 60 min is of our protagonist looking around the house with a hand torch. Now I feel that this could have been a great opportunity for the filmmakers to do a lot. But unfortunately it gets very boring, very quickly. Since the movie has very little dialogue, we need to rely on the protagonist. She was great in the beginning but I felt she was losing interest and her performance felt unreal during the last third.

When the movie starts to pick up at points during her constant searching, the filmmakers rely much to heavily on horror cliches and random jump scares as opposed to bringing in some originality to it's great concept.

I was willing to give this a positive review up until the ending. The ending was unoriginal and absolutely impossible. Not only are there an endless amount of plot holes, but the reason behind it was not fully explained.

I for one found the camera work to be amazing especially with the movie's concept, but felt it was strongly let down due to it's frustratingly slow pacing and atrocious ending.