The Silent House
The Silent House
| 27 January 2011 (USA)
The Silent House Trailers

Laura and her father Wilson arrive at a cottage off the beaten path in order to repair it since its owner will soon put the house on sale. They will spend the night there in order to start the repairs the following morning. Everything seems to go on smoothly until Laura hears a sound that comes from outside and gets louder and louder in the upper floor of the house. Wilson goes up to see what is going on while she remains downstairs on her own waiting for her father to come down. The plot is based on a true story that occurred in the 1940s in a small village in Uruguay. La casa muda focuses on the last seventy eight minutes, second by second, as Laura tries to leave the house unharmed and discovers the dark secret it hides.

Reviews
Andy

I don't think you can say much about this movie, other that it really sucks! Bad acting in a "documentaristic style" that makes cry for taking back the old snuff/mondo movies! No suspense, no fear, no gore, just the classic "traped in the house with the killer" and some "mind trip" attempt sadly failed. If you really want to watch this movie prepare yourself to be there, watching a girls running around am old house in the dark for almost all the movie lenght, just discover what you understand after ten minutes.Even the old Jess Franco movies were more reasonable than this one! At least there were some nice nude scenes!

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Aaron Woolston

For a $6000 budget, filmed in the country of Uruguay, and allegedly filmed in a single shot in the course of 4 days, The silent house seemed like quite the contender for the horror films of 2010 .To begin with the camera effects seem to have the 'marmite' affect on most people, you love it or you hate it, and in my case I love them, you see the shaky camera effects make you feel as if you are there amongst the horror of the mysterious murders/ circumstances. Although the camera offers us a 3rd person view of the main protagonist through out, until the very end, this somehow tells us the story in her eyes, which I think was done pretty well.Otherwise the real downer of this film is the story line, this wasn't based on a true story, it was based on the fact that 2 people were found dead, this is merely a way to make films slightly more scary, For example do you really think there was a monster in Europe, and it's master called Frankenstein? No... This is one of the weapons in story tellers arsenal, it helps keeps you on the edge of your seat, and keeps you wondering at night, but I digress the story is cheap and cliché, though the film can split into 2 parts, The first part that keeps us on edge after the suspicious death of Laura's father after that comes the second part which is a downwards spiral of despair, and definitely kept me wondering of why I was watching the film, but something kept me glued to it and perhaps that was the fact that I wanted to see how it ended, to see if this was a cheap copy of Paranormal activity or just an alternative to Shrooms without the 'Shrooms. The story isn't explained very well at all, and I had to come here to find out what hell was going on.To conclude if you want to watch a cheap cliché horror, this should waste an hour or so...

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valleyjohn

The Spanish have been leading the way in horror movies in recent years. Rec and the Orphanage are two examples of great horror's which makes it all the more disappointing that The Silent House is such a poor film.This the story of Laura and her dad , Wilson who are asked to do up an old house but it soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary house and that things are not what they seem.The best thing about this film is that it's only 80 minutes long. I don't know if i would have got to the end if it was a normal length film. This starts really well . It is suspenseful and has the feel of a Blare Witch type movie. There are very long scenes without breaking away , following the girl around this spooky house but then the film changes. It starts to become confused ( as i was) and far too clever for it's own good and instead of becoming a good old fashioned haunted house move it changes direction - for the worse. I was annoyed by this film because quite clearly it never had an ending to start with. The director snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.

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princessktina

This film was cleverly recorded, fairly well acted and managed to remain tense throughout. It isn't an 'in your face' horror film, there's no over the top gore and the scares mainly come from slowly built up scenes which are more unsettling than jumpy. But if you're a person who finds films such as Paranormal Activity etc. boring, this one may not be a great choice as action wise it works at a similar pace. Saying that, this film may not be such a brilliant choice anyway...The plot seemed to be all over the place; yes, it's good to give the audience something to piece together but this seemed to leave people outright confused instead - a happy medium would have been nice. It starts off as your standard horror movie: scared girl in a creepy house with weird things going on around her. At first, it seems all paranormal, then you think there's a psychotic murderer in a house, then it's just all over the place. The only way I can understand the twist in this movie is that Laura (who is totally insane) hallucinates and is unaware of what she's done; her father is killed while she's still downstairs yet at the end it is revealed she is the person who killed both her father and her supposed husband/father of her dead child. The only way I can understand this is that the plot is so erratic because it's representing the situation from the viewpoint of an absolute psycho (Laura). She can't remember killing her father and seems distraught when she discovers his death and in this way, is almost schizophrenic with one personality one minute and another one the next, both compensating for the other whilst the other personality is in control, i.e. filling in the gaps with a story plausible in her own mind. At the end, she's fully aware of what she's doing/has done and is shown to blame the two men and their sex driven interests for the death of her child, who she sees at the very end of the film during another hallucination. The possible reasons for this are endless and it's never clear really why it is she blames them. It's a possibility she was raped by one of them and had an abortion as a result, is worried for the safety of her child being born with a sex obsessed father, the child was actually born and died very young leaving her mentally unstable with grief...who knows. For me, that's annoying. I want to know the actual reason and twists only work if everything falls into place once they're revealed which, needless to say, this didn't. Although it's all well and good using the 'yeah well she's crazy so of course it doesn't make sense' excuse for the whole film, for me this ruined it and working it all out was more tiring than interesting. For every question that's answered there's something else that doesn't make sense and is inconsistent, which is why I didn't enjoy it nor did I think it was particularly clever, just really annoying. You spend 99% of the film trying to work out why she's stupid enough to go back in the house after her experience in there then the remaining 1% trying to work out what the hell just happened in the last 99%. Not good!So, although it had its good points, the plot (or lack of) massively outweighs the positive. It would have actually have been better if it was just left as a paranormal sort of film with creepy looking people in doorways and haunted funfair music playing upstairs. It's just not scary any more once you know it's all just a psychotic chick running around with a garden implement...

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