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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Silent House

SILENT HOUSE (Chris Kentis, Laura Lau). 86 minutes. Opens Friday (March 9). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


Martha Marcy May Marlene was no fluke. Elizabeth Olsen is an amazing actor, and Silent House lets her stretch out in a markedly different direction than did her subtle, mercurial debut.

As Sarah, a young woman terrorized by someone or something in a boarded-up old house, Olsen spends most of the movie nearly incoherent with panic, and she does it in what appears to be a single sustained take.

Remaking Gustavo Hernández’s intriguing but deeply flawed 2010 Uruguayan thriller La Casa Muda, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (Open Water) have addressed several of that film’s problems, bolstering its internal logic and opening up the material while preserving its suffocating, claustrophobic structure.

But by staying true to that structure, they doom themselves to repeating the mistakes that bring down the original – specifically, the series of reveals in the last third that deflate the tension and eventually garble the plot beyond coherence.

Kentis and Lau handle the single-take gimmick nicely. Silent House must have been a nightmare to stage, yet director of photography Igor Martinovic makes it look effortless. Still, it’s ultimately just a gimmick, offering suspense without substance, no matter how ferociously Olsen rips into her part.

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