Silent House | |
---|---|
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 |
|
Music by | Nathan Larson |
Cinematography | Igor Martinovic |
Production
company |
LD Entertainment
Elle Driver Productions Eye for an Eye Filmworks Tazora Films Cinema Management Group |
Distributed by |
Open Road Films Universal Pictures |
Release date
|
|
Running time
|
87 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $2 million |
Box office | $13.1 million |
Silent House is a 2011 American horror film directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau. The plot focuses on a young woman who is terrorized in her family vacation home while cleaning the property with her father and uncle. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and was released in United States (US) theaters on March 9, 2012.
The film 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 is notable for its use of "real time" footage and the manufactured appearance of a single continuous shot, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).
A young woman named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) is staying at her family's dilapidated Victorian house in the countryside with her father and her uncle, helping them fix it up. Due to petty fighting between Sarah's uncle and her father, her uncle decides to take a break from working and drives into town to get tools. While her father works upstairs, there is a knock on the door and Sarah answers it, meeting a young woman named Sophia who claims to be one of Sarah's childhood friends, though Sarah does not remember her. The two plan to meet again later.
Soon after, Sarah hears strange noises upstairs and immediately notifies her father. He is not worried, but goes to check, finding nothing. Sarah calms down, but soon hears the sound of her father falling down the stairs. Panicked, she tries to leave the house but all exits are locked or boarded up, and she hides from an unknown perpetrator who attempts to grab hold of her under a table. Sarah searches for her father and finds him unconscious with a head wound. She runs to the basement in search of the cellar door leading outside, and finds a bed and other human necessities, evidence that someone else has been living there, possibly squatters. She sees a figure shining a light in the basement to find her but she escapes out the cellar door.
Outside, she meets her uncle, who has returned, and sees a young girl on the side of the road who disappears before her eyes. Her uncle insists on driving them back to the house to rescue her father, despite Sarah's plea that they should both go get help. They discover her father's body to be missing, and find a generator lamp running on the third floor of the house in the billiard room. While searching the billiard room, the generator kicks off; the only source of light available is a Polaroid camera's flash.