The Silent House

Years ago, there was a computer game named Myst.  In the game, the player wanders around a labyrinth seeking clues necessary to advance the plot.  But the game was impossibly difficult and the clues fiendishly subtle and so the player never really advanced at all through the maze.  Instead, you found yourself exploring the same rooms over and over again, pointing your cursor at the same knickknacks and old books, peering into dark cellars and shadowy alcoves without ever making any progress toward solving the game's mystery.  The film, The Silent House, offers a similar experience. 

A bargain basement mash-up of The Shining with The Sixth Sense, The Silent House features a female protagonist, a teenage girl of uncertain age, who wanders around a gloomy house in the country for about 85 minutes.  (The film was made by Gustavo Hernandez in Uruguay in 2010). The girl begins her adventure with her father, but he ends up dead in the first fifteen minutes and, thereafter, the heroine has no one to talk to -- it becomes for all intents and purposes a silent picture.  The handheld camera simply tracks the girl around the premises while she explores the various shadowy nooks and crannies of the house, one of those uncanny structures that seems to proliferate rooms and, even, floors as the film proceeds.  It's a dull movie and fundamentally predictable -- the girl turns out to be the evil spirit haunting the house, a place that was used as a sort of brothel for sex parties sponsored by the protagonist's father and his smarmy buddy.  This is finally revealed by a series of surprisingly chaste polaroid photographs posted in the attic of the house, evidence of sex parties that seem to have involved lots of drinking but not much else, photographs that feature the girl-heroine back when she was still in the land of the living (like the picture that Kubrick explores in the final image of The Shining).  There are a few ineffective spasms of violence -- the girl wields a sickle but the movie is not really gory, certainly, not scary at all, and, more or less, simply confusing and ambiguous.  The picture is so low-budget that it seems to have been shot over a sunny weekend in someone's summer cabin -- you can't tell if the murky light is supposed be "day-or-night" representation of after-dark landscapes or just an F-stop that was set wrong.  Most notably, the film purports to be shot in a single take, although, in fact, there are plenty of inky black doorways and cellar entries into which the camera can be pointed so that the screen will go black, a cheating effect of the kind you can see at the end of reels in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, also purportedly featuring one continuous take.  (The same cheating takes place in Inarittu's Birdman, but that film is made in a much more sophisticated manner and, certainly, is far more seamless that The Silent House).  Here this bravura technique seems more or less pointless and, in fact, even lazy and since the film was shot digitally using some kind of low-budget Steadi-cam, the effect is less impressive than annoying.  We're stuck with the girl-ghost who apparently has to avenge herself on her father and his buddy for all eternity -- she's like Jack Nicholson stuck at the Overlook Hotel forever.  And the movie is so dull and witless that it seems to last an eternity.