Remaking a movie can be a tricky prospect. If the source material is held in high regard, people might not be quick to accept it. I guess that's why some studios will turn to movies for foreign countries for material. Remakes of Asian horror were all the rage for the first half of the last decade, but burned out after the one-two punch of some financial failures and the growing popularity of "torture porn" at the time. But American adaptations of foreign horror still pop up on occasion.
Such is the case with Silent House, which arrives in theaters today. A remake of the Uruguayan thriller La Casa Muda, Silent House takes a cue from how Quarantine approached [∙REC] and duplicated La Casa Muda right down to how the movie itself was made. Silent House follows in La Casa Muda's footsteps and was shot with a handheld camera and edited to look like one long, continuous take. The movie was met with mostly positive reviews when it screened at the Sundance Film Festival last year, and combining that with my own positive experience with La Casa Muda, I'm hoping Silent House doesn't let me down.
The movie follows a young woman named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), who is helping her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) renovate their old family home with the intention of selling it. So far out in the boonies that cell phone coverage is out of the question, the house is in a tremendous state of disrepair. The windows have been boarded up to keep squatters out, there's no electricity, and there's a mold problem that threatens to consume the entire house.
Sarah and her father are alone in the house late one evening when she hears a noise coming from upstairs. An investigation comes up fruitless, and her father tries convincing her that it's probably just rats. But when the noises get louder and more frequent, Sarah discovers that her father has seemingly disappeared. She quickly realizes that something evil is in the house and that there's no one who can help her. The trapped Sarah must now try and survive the dark secrets that lie within the dilapidated house.
Say what you will about most remakes, but Silent House actually does a great job at replicating the whole experience of La Casa Muda. It's a suspenseful, frightening movie that, much like the movie it's derived from, pretty much runs off the rails during the last ten or fifteen minutes. Silent House is a damn fine horror flick whose only real problem is what I felt was a less than satisfactory ending. But I'm not going to hold the ending against it, because outside of that, the movie is great.
Directing the movie are Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, the husband-and-wife duo that created the 2003 "lost at sea" thriller Open Water. Though the bigger budget at their disposal means that Silent House looks more polished than La Casa Muda, Kentis and Lau still manage to craft a movie that is very effective. Even when it feels like they're just doing La Casa Muda's greatest hits, they've managed to pack the movie with some real scares and suspense. They succeed in making Silent House an intense ride from beginning to end.
Kentis and Lau also use the "single uninterrupted shot with a handheld camera" gimmick that La Casa Muda used to its own advantage, which makes the remake just as visually thrilling as the movie that spawned it. The directors and cinematographer Igor Martinovic really know how to use this technique well, though you can point out some moments where they could have snuck in edits. One or two moments are blatantly obvious, but some of the other possible moments could go either way. You could probably turn it into a drinking game if you so desired.
I just wish, though, that they had used a Steadicam or something a little smoother for the camerawork. There were more than a few instances where the camera was bouncing and shaking around so much that the movie looked like one of Matt Damon's Bourne movies. It got to the point where I thought Kentis and Lau would have been better off doing Silent House as a "found footage" movie instead. But regardless of that, the directors have done a great job.
It's just unfortunate that the script didn't work out as well. Written by Lau, the script does stay close to the source, but that isn't always a good thing. For starters, there's pretty much no character development whatsoever. I can imagine that would be hard to accomplish in a short movie with a narrative told in real time, but the characters are still thoroughly one-dimensional.
And then there's the problem of the twist ending again. The twist itself isn't so bad this time around, since at least Lau tries to set it up. The fact that there are actually some clues this time around is nice, but some of the clues and the ways the characters react to them made it easy to figure out at least part of the twist. The other part I saw coming only because I'd seen La Casa Muda. Maybe it would have been different if I hadn't seen it so recently, I don't know.
I also thought the ending was kinda weird, in the sense that I thought it came off too much like the twist in High Tension. (Be warned, this paragraph contains SPOILERS, so skip ahead if you want to avoid them.) They never say whether the house was actually haunted or if it's just a hallucination or what, I know I compared La Casa Muda's ending to High Tension's, but a parallel between High Tension and Silent House seems more apropos. I'm guessing the whole thing was a fantasy caused by a mental breakdown, but it's not exactly made 100% clear.
(Okay, no more spoilers, I promise.)
Another way Silent House copies La Casa Muda is its awesome lead actress. The movie would have lived or died by the performance of its star, and Elizabeth Olsen is far from a let down. I'd heard she was a great actress thanks to all the acclaim she got for Martha Marcy May Marlene last year, but having not seen that particular movie, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, she's the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, neither of whom are master thespians. But surprise, she's nothing short of amazing. Olsen plays the role with conviction and earnestness, making her both believable and sympathetic. It's a fantastic performance that is enough to convince me that Olsen has a very bright future ahead of her.
I've said some good and some bad about Silent House, but my honest opinion is that it's a genuinely spooky movie. I have no idea why it hadn't secured any legitimate distribution during the fourteen months that have passed since its screening at Sundance. Sure, the ending is a little weak and the movie at large might not please everyone. But Silent House is good enough for me to recommend it to any and all fans of horror movies. And is it wrong that I kept accidentally typing "Silent Hill" instead? Maybe I just want to see a sequel to the Silent Hill movie? Because I actually kinda do.
Final Rating: ***½
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