The Silent House (2010)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Fantastic!

Awesome Movie

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

After Laura arrives with her father in a house that looks sinister, just before they prepare to bedtime she hears some strange sounds coming from upstairs. How they don't stop she wake on her dad and he goes up to check but he's not coming back and Laura after she goes after him found her father dead. Doesn't lasts much and she feels like someone is touching her when she goes to investigate the house in the dark and gets scared and runs away into the woods but she doesn't get to far because she meets Nestor and they go back in the house but he will end the same way only this time we found out why and the author of the crime.It is a slow and boring movie, we see Laura walking thru the house with a lamp, it's not something very catchy, the only good thing about this is that it's short but even so I do not recommend you watch at a late hour in the night and not because it's something scary but there's a risk to suddenly grab sleep.This film is inspired by a real fact. The only real fact is that this film is foolishness.

If you've ever seen the movie Adaptation with Nicholas Cage, then this is exactly the movie that Charlie Kaufman's twin brother would have made. Just a pathetic collection of clichés littered across a bland, hard to see setting. Most of the movie only consists of Laura looking at and poking around at various objects scattered through the house. When she is being chased by this mysterious figure that doesn't concern her, she would rather look at old Polaroid cameras or pictures hanging on the wall or little trinkets laying on tables. So the supposedly "tense" situation is nullified by the nonchalant air that Laura just strolls around the house with. And the whole thing is just clichés building on other clichés. "Stay here I'll go say hello to whoever is upstairs." "Let's split up," blah blah blah. And then this character that was living upstairs just disappears never to return even though he was physically present, and this is where I spoil that it's the stupidest movie ever. I can watch shitty horror, hell I even enjoyed Uwe Boll's House of the Dead. But this movie holds no enjoyment for anyone with a grade school education.

First off, this movie is very sound-driven. Another example for this is Ils - which could practically serve as a testbed for 6.1 surround sound systems.Secondly, Silent house is also visually driven through camera-work that is quite novel, in the realm of cinema. Over the past decade gamers have been spoiled with cinema-esque game productions which soon left traditional cinema in the dust. The reason lies in computer rendered graphics by necessity and virtual cameras, which aren't limited by budget or physical laws. (To get an idea, check this out: http://tinyurl.com/823cv7j==Visuals==Silent house assumes a steadycam camera-position that follows the protagonist (a photogenic young female) around, in either third-person or at times-first person perspective. Depth of Field "Jitter" is used from the very beginning to augment and focus the visuals. (To get an idea, watch this short segment, shot with the same camera as "Silent house": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIeUGP1bD04 )Despite the dilapidated interiors, the movie feels modern. Lightning in combination with the digital camera specifications is perfect and creates good atmosphere. The runtime of roughly 70 minutes appeals to the attention-span of young generations. No scene felt gratuitous or overly long. The concise plot may for some be indeed a dead-giveaway, yet the movie-twist is handled in a jaw-dropping way (again augmented by the visuals and sound) ==Will I like it?==You should check out the movie-stills and whether they appeal to you. The horror is obviously of the mundane-horror category, i.e. no supernatural involved. This is clear from minute one, as the movie starts with "based on real events". The religious, supernatural BS pretty much ruined "Rec". The supernatural simply isn't to everone's liking.If you don't get into the movie visually ==within the first 5 minutes==, augmented by the great sound-work, it will definitely not deliver.Silent house arguably lacks a strong plot and character development, but makes up for it visually and by the sound-design. If you don't like Silent house, chances are you won't like Final fantasy or Transformers either.==Budget==I was under the impression to be treated to a high-value production. And I wasn't disappointed. Only afterwards did I learn the budget was somewhat low. Notably budget claims and how it pertains to the finished product are usually more than obscure and nothing which should be given great gravity.I would reckon that many gamers will like Silent house a lot. After all at the moment it is pretty much taking what we can get (such as 300, Spartacus, Appleseed but also unknowns such as "Serbian movie"), till more cinema productions appealing to younger generations are created.==Rating== 9/10 (Novelty, Plot, Sound, Runtime) For comparison: Confessions 10/10

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...