Silent House (2011)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Admirable film.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) helps her dad (Adam Trese) and creepy uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens, "My have you grown Sarah") clean up an old family lake house for resale. The cousins didn't want to help. Sarah has very little memory of the place as a child and doesn't even remember the neighbor girl who she played with...hmmm. The house has been vandalized and appears to have rodent damage which prevents the use of electricity. It is unnaturally pitch black dark inside, even during the day because the house is boarded up and of course they don't have cell phone reception. Between these few clues and the title of the film, we know which direction the film is going to take, just not the details. Yawn.Sarah becomes unnerved by things that go bump in the night and much of the film is dark or poorly lit with camera angels that focus on Sarah's cleavage. When they are not focused on her cleavage, they are extremely bad amateur angels that distracted from the film instead of enhancing it. Might work as a rental if you ran out of paint to watch dry. A fair film made bad by a director trying out gimmicks.F-bomb, strong sexual innuendo, no nudity outside of cleavage.

Not a terrible story idea, basic concept of a spooky house idea. I loved the real-time aspect of it. The thing that confused me about it was the choice to use shaky-cam/found-footage type camera work when it is not a found-footage film. It made little sense and actually detracted from the impact of the story rather than added to it in my opinion. Other than that, it's an okay film, drags at points but overall not a bad thing to watch if you're binge watching horror movies for fun.

This one kept me guessing. What I thought was going to be a straightforward Gothic slow-burn ghost story took me by surprise, and shows the severity of damage which results from a certain widespread form of abuse. The shots are genuinely spooky, the acting is quite good, the storyline is pertinent to societal concerns, and the pacing is classically brooding--all in all making this one worth the watch. This is a remake of 'La Casa Muda', a Spanish language film.

(50%) An affective, if overall nothing new little horror flick that's not exactly terrifying, but I thought Elizabeth Olsen was really quite good as she goes through the emotions of being alone within a spooky old house. And although the one take trick isn't exactly perfect, it's still a decent attempt at the concept with a fair amount of decent tension. I myself am fine with the so called problem ending as at least it tried to do something interesting, and didn't just blame everything that happened on ghosts, or maybe a boogie man of some kind. Overall this is a perfectly decent watch for anyone in the mood for a short slice of watchable horror.