Sadly Over-hyped

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

If you've ever seen the movie Adaptation with Nicholas Cage, then this is exactly the movie that Charlie Kaufman's twin brother would have made. Just a pathetic collection of clichés littered across a bland, hard to see setting. Most of the movie only consists of Laura looking at and poking around at various objects scattered through the house. When she is being chased by this mysterious figure that doesn't concern her, she would rather look at old Polaroid cameras or pictures hanging on the wall or little trinkets laying on tables. So the supposedly "tense" situation is nullified by the nonchalant air that Laura just strolls around the house with. And the whole thing is just clichés building on other clichés. "Stay here I'll go say hello to whoever is upstairs." "Let's split up," blah blah blah. And then this character that was living upstairs just disappears never to return even though he was physically present, and this is where I spoil that it's the stupidest movie ever. I can watch shitty horror, hell I even enjoyed Uwe Boll's House of the Dead. But this movie holds no enjoyment for anyone with a grade school education.

I'm going to put my cards on the table; up until the 'twist', this is actually a very good horror tale - chilling, atmospheric and gritty - psychologically well conceived and goes towards the 'Ring' side of terror rather than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre direction.Unfortunately the twist undoes everything leading up to it, and was so woefully contrived that it makes no sense and is purely for initial shock value. Before the viewer then pieces it all together and realises there's zero coherence between pre-twist story and post-twist.Laura is a young lady, accompanying her father to a property in Uruguay, where they meet family friend Nestor to help clean the place out for a client who is trying to sell the place. However, as soon as her father goes for a nap, Laura becomes embroiled in horror and finds herself hunted.As for as atmosphere and cinematography goes, the single-camera adds and detracts at the same time. While the viewer always feels 'with' Laura, the inability to switch to a different point of view for dramatic license forces the viewer to always remember she's a character and an actress is playing her. Notable examples are when Laura views something the camera cannot see - rather than switch to her 'eye view' mode, the camera literally has to swoop in on it to show the audience. Which makes it feel slightly bizarre - that would happen in a documentary, not in a fictional movie.But it does all feel claustrophobic and some of the solitary camera moments are well-designed.The problem is that twist - that twist which renders the first half completely null and void. Unlike other reviews I will not spoil it, but the number of holes it leaves basically undermines absolutely everything which went before it.It gives far too many questions, and there is one question alluded to in another review which, when asked on realisation of the twist, makes the film's first half genuinely stupid.This was a good idea - a single camera (if not a single shot) and a tight, chilling, claustrophobic horror with mild violence and plenty of unseen (and seen) chills. The twist, alas, takes it from 9/10 to only 6.Sad.

For a $6000 budget, filmed in the country of Uruguay, and allegedly filmed in a single shot in the course of 4 days, The silent house seemed like quite the contender for the horror films of 2010 .To begin with the camera effects seem to have the 'marmite' affect on most people, you love it or you hate it, and in my case I love them, you see the shaky camera effects make you feel as if you are there amongst the horror of the mysterious murders/ circumstances. Although the camera offers us a 3rd person view of the main protagonist through out, until the very end, this somehow tells us the story in her eyes, which I think was done pretty well.Otherwise the real downer of this film is the story line, this wasn't based on a true story, it was based on the fact that 2 people were found dead, this is merely a way to make films slightly more scary, For example do you really think there was a monster in Europe, and it's master called Frankenstein? No... This is one of the weapons in story tellers arsenal, it helps keeps you on the edge of your seat, and keeps you wondering at night, but I digress the story is cheap and cliché, though the film can split into 2 parts, The first part that keeps us on edge after the suspicious death of Laura's father after that comes the second part which is a downwards spiral of despair, and definitely kept me wondering of why I was watching the film, but something kept me glued to it and perhaps that was the fact that I wanted to see how it ended, to see if this was a cheap copy of Paranormal activity or just an alternative to Shrooms without the 'Shrooms. The story isn't explained very well at all, and I had to come here to find out what hell was going on.To conclude if you want to watch a cheap cliché horror, this should waste an hour or so...

This film was cleverly recorded, fairly well acted and managed to remain tense throughout. It isn't an 'in your face' horror film, there's no over the top gore and the scares mainly come from slowly built up scenes which are more unsettling than jumpy. But if you're a person who finds films such as Paranormal Activity etc. boring, this one may not be a great choice as action wise it works at a similar pace. Saying that, this film may not be such a brilliant choice anyway...The plot seemed to be all over the place; yes, it's good to give the audience something to piece together but this seemed to leave people outright confused instead - a happy medium would have been nice. It starts off as your standard horror movie: scared girl in a creepy house with weird things going on around her. At first, it seems all paranormal, then you think there's a psychotic murderer in a house, then it's just all over the place. The only way I can understand the twist in this movie is that Laura (who is totally insane) hallucinates and is unaware of what she's done; her father is killed while she's still downstairs yet at the end it is revealed she is the person who killed both her father and her supposed husband/father of her dead child. The only way I can understand this is that the plot is so erratic because it's representing the situation from the viewpoint of an absolute psycho (Laura). She can't remember killing her father and seems distraught when she discovers his death and in this way, is almost schizophrenic with one personality one minute and another one the next, both compensating for the other whilst the other personality is in control, i.e. filling in the gaps with a story plausible in her own mind. At the end, she's fully aware of what she's doing/has done and is shown to blame the two men and their sex driven interests for the death of her child, who she sees at the very end of the film during another hallucination. The possible reasons for this are endless and it's never clear really why it is she blames them. It's a possibility she was raped by one of them and had an abortion as a result, is worried for the safety of her child being born with a sex obsessed father, the child was actually born and died very young leaving her mentally unstable with grief...who knows. For me, that's annoying. I want to know the actual reason and twists only work if everything falls into place once they're revealed which, needless to say, this didn't. Although it's all well and good using the 'yeah well she's crazy so of course it doesn't make sense' excuse for the whole film, for me this ruined it and working it all out was more tiring than interesting. For every question that's answered there's something else that doesn't make sense and is inconsistent, which is why I didn't enjoy it nor did I think it was particularly clever, just really annoying. You spend 99% of the film trying to work out why she's stupid enough to go back in the house after her experience in there then the remaining 1% trying to work out what the hell just happened in the last 99%. Not good!So, although it had its good points, the plot (or lack of) massively outweighs the positive. It would have actually have been better if it was just left as a paranormal sort of film with creepy looking people in doorways and haunted funfair music playing upstairs. It's just not scary any more once you know it's all just a psychotic chick running around with a garden implement...