REVIEW: "Silent House" starts out promising enough, reminding viewers that the scariest thing in any horror movie is the unknown. There are no monsters, just a slow dread that grows as Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the famed twins) begins to believe that something, or someone, might be lurking in the shadowy corners of a dark old house.
But while Olsen is great at looking terrorized, "Silent House" subscribes to all the horror-movie no-nos. Hey, let's split up! We have a chance to flee the scary house, let's not take it! For no apparent reason, let's go down in the spooky basement! May as well drop that weapon, I'm sure we won't need it again! I'll slowly back myself into this dark room without bothering to see what's in there!
College-aged Sarah is supposedly helping her dad (Adam Trese) and uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) fix up their lakeside summer house before selling it. Yet no one does any work, Dad and Uncle don't seem to like each other, and there's no power in the sprawling home. Soon the things that go bump in the night have arrived, Dad's all bloody, and Sarah's running for her life from an unseen presence.
The film offers up some neat tricks, running in real time and appearing to have been shot in a single camera take (critical consensus is that the cuts were artfully concealed). There's one great moment involving Sarah hiding in an SUV where the car's technology lets her know she's not as safe as she'd thought, and a neat trick where the flash from a Polaroid camera briefly illuminates parts of a room.
But it's all buildup and no delivery, as if the filmmakers knew enough to set up a spooky setting but lost the part of the script that explains what's really going on. The ending is eye-rollingly lame, if not ripped from an Aerosmith song. Best to stay away from this "House."
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