The Silent House chills your bones even if it doesn’t quite get under your skin.
From the spiffy 3D of 1953’s House of Wax to the mock-doc histrionics of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, the horror film has proved a fertile place for formal experimentation. After all, no one questions the point of something if it’s petrifying, and where better to innovate than from the margins?
Unfortunately, for every envelope-shunting eureka moment there’s cheap gimmickry aplenty – William Castle’s electrified seats and Smell-O-Vision spring to mind, although the two were, sadly, never combined. Perhaps cheesiest of all was the 'Werewolf Break' in The Beast Must Die, a 30-second countdown inviting viewers to guess the culprit – the producer, presumably – or just nip out for a cheeky slash.
So it’s with a little trepidation that even the most hardened horror fan will approach The Silent House, a 78-minute Uruguayan spook story shot, apparently, in one unbroken take (although it looks more like five plus, albeit cleverly concealed). By necessity the set-up is a simple one – Laura (Florencia Colucci) and her father (Gustavo Alonso) prepare Nestor’s (Abel Tripaldi) remote cottage for sale – so there’s no need to dwell too much on plot, particularly as no one else has.
To begin with the ever-present, ever-juddering camera irritates where it should immerse. Although there are legimate reasons for not using a steadicam, every bump jolts us out of the story, reminding us that Laura is being filmed by a cinematographer rather than shadowed by an all-seeing eye. Once she’s alone in the dark, however, it’s a different story – a shit-scary one.
As in The Blair Witch, the sense that we’re exploring an oppressive, 360-degree reality rather than a set makes up for any amateurish moments, and the insistently creepy atmosphere is punctured by some brilliant heart-in-mouth gotchas.
Besides the clever use of Polaroid photos, which map real time the same way director Gustavo Hernández aspires to, there’s no depth or subtext here; the decision to film in this manner reducing everything to a meal of condiments – all salt and pepper, no sustenance. But so what?
Ambitious, technically accomplished and, in places, extraordinarily effective, The Silent House chills your bones even if it doesn’t quite get under your skin.
The greatest idea ever?
You’ll cack yourself then forget why.
A flawed but fascinating experiment.
View 9 comments
Anton Bitel
• 2 years agoI know next to nothing about digital cameras, and have certainly never used one - but I had thought that the maximum capacity for a single take was determined chiefly by the size of the camera's hard drive - and that the storage space on most decent cameras can easily be expanded by add-ons and peripherals. There have been other single-take feature-length films since the advent of digicam (Timecode 2000, Russian Ark).
Anton Bitel
• 2 years agoI have it on good authority that the whole film (apart from the coda) really was shot in a single, fluid take, with no tricky splices or edits added in later. That this is hard to believe just adds to the director's (and cinematographer's) rep.
Completely agree that the film is fun but forgettable. The limitations of the one-take setup make the footage of Laura playing cat and mouse in the house begin to drag way too early. Hernández is, though, rather clever in the way that he uses a one-take shakicam filming style - conventionally associated with on-the-spot realism, even with reportage - utterly to wrongfoot the viewer...
JamieR
• 2 years agoAnyway, whilst the answer is intruiging as trivia, ultimately it makes no difference to the final product whether it really was one take or just appeared to be so. If anything, if it really was then the filmmakers have caused themselves a lot of unneccessary bother.
Mattg
• 2 years agoJamieR
• 2 years agoJamieR
• 2 years agoYou might disagree with Barthes, of course. And you may well be right re: camera hard drive add-ons - just reporting what I'd heard (and am equally technically ignorant!).
Anton Bitel
• 2 years agoI'm not really disagreeing with you, but it seems odd to base one argument on the extratextual authority of Herzog, and then to base the next argument on a Barthes thesis that precisely invalidates appeals to such authority.
Of course 'there's nothing at stake other than the story of making it' - but to me at least, that's actually something rather than nothing. Just as knowing that actor X did all her own stunts, or that actor Y really did starve himself near to death for a role, or that director Q hypnotised his entire cast before filming (that's Herzog again), adds something to a film's impact. To me, knowing that The Silent House really is - or is not - shot in a single take affects my response to the film, even if only to add a certain frisson. It is not necessarily a worse film if the single take is faked - but it is a different film.
JamieR
• 2 years agoMattg
• 2 years ago