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The Silent House (2011)

La casa muda

Real Fear In Real Time

Rating: 4/10

Running Time: 86 minutes

On DVD

Wilson (Weel-sorn – Alonso) and Laura (L-ow-ra – Colucci) and are father and daughter who travel to a house they own in the bush to renovate it before they can sell it. When they bed down for the night, Laura hears sounds upstairs and Daddy goes upstairs to investigate. Needless to say, he doesn’t return and Laura spends the rest of the film fumbling around in the dark trying to get out.

The Silent House is a Uruguayan horror film that showed potential. For a start, it’s in Spanish, which for horror films is always a good start, and as you can see from the start of my review, I love South American names. Also, it was filmed in real time so the terror of the trapped protagonist really shows through and we see her search the house in a nerve-wrangling extended discovery tour. This section of the movie is quite good for a little while as the tension is certainly there in spades. Unfortunately, it’s too force-fed in an overlong and too intense manner – a man needs to unclench his buttocks at some point – and ends up being fairly dull as no scares really materialise.

It’s with the twist at the end that the whole film comes to pieces. I’m not in the business of telling you that Kevin Spacey is Kaiser Soze or that Bruce Willis is in-fact dead, so I won’t ruin it for you but the final disclosure is so hopelessly disconnected from the rest of the movie. It’s not one of those that makes you question everything you saw up until then but instead makes you question why they bothered to show you it in the first place. It’s basically a poor attempt to make the film stand out when the backstory, told in a creepy Hangover-style polaroid collage during the credits, would have been fairly interesting had it been told in a more orthodox way.

 

It's Got: Barely any scares, an ending that ruins all that went before, a strong lead performance by Florencia Colucci

It Needs: To focus more on the backstory, more South American names, a less lengthy investigation scene

DVD Extras Just a trailer - a little documentary on the true story would have been nice. DVD Extras Rating: 1/10

Summary

An ambitious Uruguayan horror with a climax that rivals ‘it was all a dream’ as the mother of all endings.