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With “Open Water,” their breakout feature as a filmmaking couple, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau showed promising interests in vérité commitment, formal experimentation and frill-free horror, crafting a DIY, fact-based tale of two doomed divers abandoned in shark-filled waters. “Silent House,” Kentis and Lau’s haunted-mansion follow-up, serves to extend its directors’ nifty penchants, but ultimately fails to advance their arty street cred. It’s a bit of a tragedy how completely their new film comes apart, grinding to a conclusion that negates 70-odd preceding minutes of ace tension.
The movie’s gimmick, as many know, is that it all unfolds — allegedly — in one continuous take, which stretches on for a whopping 88 minutes (the Uruguayan original, “The Silent House,” made in the same style, reportedly ran for 78). If Kentis and Lau truly did pull this off (this viewer didn’t detect a seam), then they’ve performed quite a feat, bringing something fresh and keenly orchestrated to the tired table of shaky-cam thrillers. Still, it is, admittedly, a shallow feat, and if anything, it draws attention away from the story and toward the production logistics.
Where it succeeds without hiccup is in the spotlighting of Elizabeth Olsen, whose dig-beneath-the-skin work in “Martha Marcy May Marlene” was, evidently, just the beginning. Playing a young woman suddenly trapped in the lakeside house her family’s renovating, Olsen is tasked to give one uninterrupted, terrorized performance, and once again, she’s scary good, quickly shifting from cool nonchalance to profound, breathless dread.
She’s not good enough, however, to remedy the film’s eventual self-enflicted wounds, which come courtesy of a tasteless, cockamamie twist ending penned by Lau and Gustavo Hernández, writer/director of the original version. The last thing any moviegoer needs is another Psych for Dummies rug-pull that upends his or her experience. From a distance, “Silent House” seems primed to inject some new blood into the American horror landscape, but the further you venture inside, the more it looks like every other bump-in-the-night shack on the block.
Silent House
R
Two reels out of four
Opens Friday in area theaters
Recommended Rental
Melancholia
R
Available Tuesday
In Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic masterpiece, Kirsten Dunst plays a bride-to-be whose crushing depression doesn’t only spoil her wedding, but may just have manifested as a massive planet bound for Earth, set to bring about the apocalypse in spectacular fashion. Never in greater control of his gift for projecting his demons (and genius) onto the screen, von Trier delivers an epic work that leaves you unraveled in your seat. The best film of 2011.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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