Silent House

No, this is not a silent movie quickly released to take advantage of the popularity of The Artist. However, it is a movie that will leave the audience silent. No applause. No screaming. No cheering. Maybe some jeering?

Filmed in real time (capturing these 82 minutes of her life on film, but not like Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian did), Elizabeth "Not One Of The Twins" Olsen stars as Sarah - a young lady helping her father clean up their old vacation lake house to sell the place off. Of course, it is a big, empty, creepy house out in the middle of nowhere with no phones and no cell signal, so you know something bad is going to happen.

Sarah is a bit frightened by all of the bumps and creaks happening around her, but real danger starts to rear its ugly head as the gamine gal sees a mysterious man in the house with her!

Is Sarah safe?

How can she escape the house?

Who is the dude?

In this tough housing market, how can you sell a house with some creepy guy walking around?

Silent House is a movie with plenty of promise, but it never gets going. Directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau appear to want Silent House to be a taught fright fest tickling our nerves with the anticipation of what might be around the corner or ready to pop out from behind a door to scare off our underpants, but not much pops out from behind the doors nor does much of anything appear to be around the corner (and our underpants stay firmly on our naughty zones, which should make Rush Limbaugh happy).

Silent House is a movie without much payoff and not much set up. Kentis and Lau (she wrote the script based on the film by Gustavo Hernandez), fail to give us a reason to care what might happen to anyone in this movie. Sure, you can't build up a massive backstory given the concept of showing us only these 82 minutes, but they leave the movie to be nothing more than a series of possible shocks, and don't deliver many shocks.

Worst of all, they provide a surprise ending that is only surprising because no one would ever think this was a good idea. Without any logic or dropping of hints along the way, Kentis and Lau drop an ending on the audience that is unfairly surprising, and kind of stupid.

Shooting the movie in real time as one, long continuous take is a nice gimmick, but they should have watched Rope from Alfred Hitchcock to show you how you can do that AND deliver an awesome movie as well.

Silent House is rated R for disturbing violent content and terror.