The Silent House

The good contributions to the genre in the last few months fell solely in the categories of either “entertaining” or “bloody”. The Silent House is an example of a horror film whose goal is to scare the viewer, and it pursues it so fiercely that it fails at telling a story. The film takes place in real time and its biggest attraction is that its 80 minutes are one uninterrupted take (personally, I believe that this is an obstacle to an effective narration, but it’s interesting and untraditional nonetheless). The creators may have faked it more than once, but it doesn’t matter because the most important thing is the implausibility of the behaviour of Laura, the protagonist, who after a couple of minutes finds herself trapped in a house with a dangerous killer (or at least she has a reason to believe so). At that moment every reasonable person would do everything in their power to leave that house. The doors are locked, but why not try to break them, or to pull the boards from the window and jump out? No, instead of that, Laura is relatively calm (there isn’t even a hint of the hysteria of Latin-American nations) and embarks on a very slow tour of the rest of the building – a very well made and very atmospheric tour (there were two jump-scares that almost made me fall off the chair). A good, but quite irrational thriller. 7/10 (07/02/2011)

The Silent House is an Uruguayan production that is an interesting experiment that worked out quite well for the movie's makers. They went for a continuous shot movie, which clearly worked, creating a decent horror movie. Some of the scenes are truly terrifying and impressive. Still, unfortunately, some scenes are sort of empty, which is due to the format, which does not allow for having something great in each take. (04/12/2019)