PTSD from her childhood trauma, coupled with a fierce need to protect herself, caused her to believe there were intruders in the house trying to hurt her and her family. They were never there, and Sarah was the killer. There are clues that Sarah is troubled from almost the beginning. When her uncle and father arrive with her at the house on the first night, there are flashing lights and there is a brief moment when she is temporarily lost.
She looks shellshocked for a couple of seconds before snapping back to reality. This could easily be the moment she disassociates, and everything begins to unravel in her mind.
Her uncle abused other girls. Sophie was one of the girls, along with Sarah. Lastly, the bathtub scene with a much younger Sarah and the blood-soaked bed were not so subtle clues that she was sexually abused. Her uncle abused Sarah, and her father was at least passively involved.
They have an unusually antagonistic relationship which could be chalked up as normal sibling fighting, but it feels messier. He knew what Uncle Peter did and allowed it to happen. He never went to the police and kept Sarah from telling anyone. Sarah was disassociated from the event, and the trauma caused her to have a psychotic break.
Alone in the dark, in the home where the abuse happened, she snapped, and everything we see from Sophie to the people attacking her in the house is figments of her imagination. She repressed the memories and created other personalities, including the intruder, to protect herself from her uncle and the memories.
The end of Silent House is a colossal gotcha. Whether it is successful or not is debatable, but the twist is definitely something. At the end of Silent House, Sarah has completely devolved into madness. She has visions of a young girl in a tutu that could be a ghost from a haunted home or the genuine ghosts of her past. It is a fucking wreck, and one of the most conceptually dishonest American films I've seen in ages.
Olsen plays Sarah, a young woman helping her father, John Adam Trese , and uncle, Peter Eric Sheffer Stevens , rehab the old family home out in the woods, right by a lake; it has been uninhabited for ages, and left in pretty bad shape by a variety of vandals and squatters, and before it can be sold, it has to be fixed pretty much head to toe. One of the side effects of this process is that every last window has been boarded up, making the inside of the house as dark as midnight even in the late afternoon hours when it opens; add in the general sense of rot over everything, and we have a film that's pretty long on threatening atmosphere even before the arrival of Sophia Julia Taylor Ross , who claims to be a friend of Sarah's from childhood, though Sarah can't quite manage to place her; after a few cryptic comments, Sophia wanders back to the neighborhood from whence she came, and we are quite ready to expect something unpleasant to happen.
It does, in the form of a loud thump that precedes John's disappearance, whereupon Sarah becomes aware that a man the barely-seen Adam Barnett is in the house, with something unpleasant on his mind. Silent House is kind of special, in that there are two entirely different problems with it, both of which would be sufficient to scuttle the whole project: one is narrative, the other is formal. I can't discuss the narrative problem without spoiling the hell out of the movie, so I shall postpone that; in the meantime, there is the formal problem, which is that Silent House is meant to look like a single take lasting for the ish minutes the film runs without credits, moving from the rocky shore of the lake into the house from basement to third-story attic in one uninterrupted flow.
It's faked; this is Rope , not Russian Ark. But that's not the problem actually, the execution is pretty phenomenal. What is the problem, is that this gimmick is just that, a gimmick, with no apparent reason to exist other than because it makes people want to see the movie who wouldn't otherwise.
Seriously, even in Rope , which I personally regard as one of Alfred Hitchock's least-successful movies, the point of the faux-single take can be sussed out with enough work. If the same is true of Silent House , I haven't been tipped to it. Even this is mostly forgivable - I say "mostly" because such a bold gesture really does need to justify itself if it's not going to end up a distraction or annoyance - but there is a second problem with it here, which is that it does things to POV and our identification with Olsen's character that the movie cannot begin to recover from.
In essence, the longer the camera moves around without a break, the more we perceive it as a separate character, and this becomes a particularly pronounced truth in Silent House in moments when Sarah runs, which she does quite often.
It is a horror film, after all. And while a normal horror film deals with a quick-moving heroine by cutting ahead of her when she gets too far away, the gimmick here forbids that, which means that we are, in effect, chasing her; we are turning into the murderous psycho of the piece.
That might be worth exploring, but neither Kentis nor Lau see fit to explore it very much; and that leaves behind the issue of what happens to handheld video when the cinemtographer in this case, Igor Martinovic is made to break into a run.
Beyond this, they certainly don't seem to be aware of what a single take narrative implies about realism and physicality; the sound design is too artificial and the music score too pronounced to fit in with the tactility the visuals promise, and the whole thing hangs together not at all. The one and only thing that might actually work is that the physical location - the silent house itself - can be given an extra sense of presence from this; alternately, the filmmakers can subvert our expectations for such presence, which is what Kentis and Lau end up doing.
The physical geography of the house is inscrutable, partially because there is, in fact, hidden editing, and partially because of the loosey-goosey camerawork. I was initially prepared to cite this as one of the many things I hated, but there proves to be a justification, and here I must pause. With its distant, disharmonious, ambient score that seems to be operating on another level of reality, the film can make you, like its protagonist, sick with fear.
No mother is mentioned. Something in her holds back, as if to protect herself. The staging is resourceful, the scares even the annoying false ones well executed. In fact, I think this movie gave me cancer. I tried to get past the nauseating shaky camera and blurry actors.
The only scenes that were in focus were the never-ending cleavage shots of Elizabeth Olsen. I guess the gratuitous shots of her perky assets were intended to distract the audience from what a steaming pile they were watching.
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