Silent House MOVIE REVIEW

Silent House, the latest horror remake to hit the big screen, stars Martha Marcy May Marlene star (and Oscar-snub) Elizabeth Olsen as a girl moving into a summer house (or something like that) and finds herself trapped inside with a killer.  That's kind of it. The film takes the same route as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and is supposedly shot using one take (there are some cuts, that is the desired effect at least).  I haven't yet seen the original, but I thought the premise was really interesting and I loved Olsen in that other movie, so I went in expecting a nice scary time.  Well, I couldn't have been more wrong.  This was a big pile of crap, even bigger than The Woman in Black.

Nothing about this film is good except for Olsen's performance and the technical skill it must have taken to employ the long takes.  Other than that the story is awful, all the secondary characters are terribly acted, the story makes no sense, and worst of all: it's boring!  At least with most horror movies I can manage to keep myself in the moment but man, this was a real slog.  Maybe it was the fact that I was in a shitty theater and I could clearly hear the musical numbers from The Lorax playing on the other side of the wall, or maybe it was the fact that people all around me were muttering to their friends 'this is awful.'  I tried to give this a chance but I have to agree with the audience, this was just terrible, and also has one of the more perplexing, strangely off-putting endings I've seen in a while.  The only redeeming value this film has is Elizabeth Olsen's rack, which in an obvious way always seems to be a prominent element on the screen at all times (I don't think that was incidental).

Rating: D-