Silent House (2012)
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Synopsis:
Silent House is a 2011 independent horror film directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (who also reated the 2003 horror film Open Water). The plot focuses on a young woman who is terrorized in her family vacation home while cleaning up the property with her father and uncle. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, and was released in US theaters March 9, 2012.
It is a remake of the 2010 Uruguayan film La casa muda (The Silent House) which was allegedly based on an actual incident that occurred in a village in Uruguay in the 1940s. The film was marketed for its taking place in real time, and was edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).
A young woman named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) is staying at a lakeside Victorian house in the country with her father, John (Adam Trese), and Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens), fixing it up in preparation for sale. The house is in disrepair from both vandals and natural causes; there is no electricity, all of the windows are boarded up due to having been smashed in, and a serious mold problem is discovered in the house.
The two brothers bicker as they are working in the house, and Sarah's uncle decides to take a break, driving to town in his car for the afternoon, leaving Sarah and her father alone in the house. A knock is heard at the door and, since her father is upstairs working, Sarah answers. The visitor is a friendly young woman about Sarah's age, named Sophia (Julia Taylor Ross), who claims to be one of Sarah's childhood friends. Sarah doesn't remember her and Sophia suggests they meet again later. Sarah agrees and the girl leaves.
Soon after, Sarah hears strange noises upstairs and notifies her father. He goes upstairs to see if anything is wrong, but finds nothing. Sarah, calmed by her father, goes to her room to pack. Not long afterward, she hears him walking down the stairs, falling, then nothing. She frantically searches for him and finds him unconscious with a bloody wound on his head. He appears to have been deliberately knocked out.
Sarah tries to escape from the house, but all doors are locked or boarded up. She goes back to her father's unconscious body to get the only key to the front door, but he is gone. She runs to the basement and finds a bed and other human necessities indicating someone had been living downstairs. Panicking, she sees a figure (played by Adam Barnett) shining a light in the basement, looking for her.
Sarah escapes out the cellar door and flees through a field toward the road. It is just beginning to get dark outside, and she witnesses a young girl standing by the ditch, who disappears before her eyes. Her uncle's car then pulls up, and she gets in. She is covered in her father's blood and also has a gash on her arm. Her uncle decides to go back to the house to find her father, despite her begging him not to. He takes a handgun and leaves Sarah in the car ordering her to lock the doors, but Sarah runs into the house after the car's rear gatelock opens and she sees a man approaching the car.
Sarah and her uncle, armed with a gun, search the house for her father, but find nothing. While on the third floor, they see light coming from a billiard room, but nobody is there. The generator providing the light suddenly shuts off, and a scuffle is heard in the darkness. Sarah tries to leave the room and uses a Polaroid camera as a source of light. Through a series of camera flashes, Sarah sees a young girl and a male figure, and returns back to the billiard room, terrified, and hides under the pool table as the power returns. Her uncle is gone, and from under the pool table, she sees the legs of two men. A little girl is on top ofthe table and the men are taking pictures of her with the camera which they refer to as a "little game". It is implied that the men are engaging in acts of pedophilia.
Sarah then sees her uncle's unconscious body being dragged by one of the two men downstairs. She follows behind and attempts to shoot one of them with her uncle's gun but fails. She retreats to her old bedroom to hide, where she witnesses several hallucinations: a blood stain pooling on her bed, a young girl in the bathtub full of bloody water and beer bottles, and a toilet spewing blood. While she is in the bathroom witnessing this, her attacker(s) begin to smash through the wall with a sledgehammer, and she runs downstairs.
Sarah encounters Sophia in the foyer of the house, who leads her to the living room, where a fire is burning in the fireplace. In the living room, she finds her father's seated body wrapped in a transparent plastic bag, which she removes and her father regains consciousness. Her uncle is lying on the floor unconscious and wounded.
Sarah begins to exhibit signs of paranoia, multiple personalities (it is heavily implied that Sophia is actually one of these), and insanity. Sophia gives her a tin box containing Polaroid photographs of a young girl (although they are not seen, it is implied that they are pornographic), and Sarah realizes the girl in the photos to be her. She confronts her father with them, and taunts him with a knife as she makes crude references to her molestation.
Her father convinces Sarah, who is in a fit of her transitioning psyche, to untie him. When he is freed, he hits her in the face, knocking her to the floor, and begins to whip her with his belt. At the same time, her uncle regains consciousness and tells her father to stop beating her. The father mocks his brother's requests and violently kicks him before he turns back to continue beating Sarah. Sarah manages to get hold of the sledgehammer and murders her father with it.
Sarah asks her uncle why he allowed her father to abuse her; he desperately states it was a mistake that he should have stopped and apologizes. Sarah lets him live and walks outside silently. As the camera lingers on the house, the film fades to black. It is implied that Sarah was the perpetrator the entire time and the film is seen from her viewpoint while she was hallucinating due to her traumatic childhood.
Directed by Chris Kentis, Laura Lau
Produced by Agnes Mentre, Laura Lau
Screenplay by Laura Lau
Based on The Silent House screenplay by Oscar Estevez
Starring
Elizabeth Olsen
Adam Trese
Eric Sheffer Stevens
Music by Nathan Larson
Cinematography: Igor Martinovic
Studio: LD Entertainment, Elle Driver Productions, Eye for an Eye Filmworks, Tazora Films
Distributed by Open Road Films
Release date: January 21, 2011 (Sundance)
March 9, 2012 (United States)
Running time: 85 minutes
Language: English
Box office: $12,738,573
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