Premise: A young woman unpacks trauma in her family's old summer house.
The main reason I watched this movie was because it was a horror movie that received the incredibly rare F CinemaScore. For those of you who are unfamiliar, CinemaScore is a service that on opening weekends, gets grade ratings for movies from people who just watched them, then reports those to whoever will listen. F CinemaScore movies are fascinating to me, because it only sometimes means the movies are bad. Remember, these are grades from people who chose to see a movie. That's self-selecting. Most people only go see movies they think they'll enjoy. People who hate Michael Bay movies aren't typically the ones seeing them in theaters. To get an F CinemaScore, a movie tends to have to deliver something vastly different than what the audience expects.
I had a decent idea of what Silent House was going in. It's shot like a continuous take for the entire 87 minutes. It follows Elizabeth Olsen as cleaning out her family's old summer house with her father and uncle turns into a possible home invasion and eventually revelations of old trauma she experienced there.
I totally get the CinemaScore it got. The movie is pitch like a home invasion movie. Think, The Strangers or maybe The Amityville Horror. It even starts like that. But, eventually it turns into a story about childhood sexual abuse. That's a sharp turn that an audience really needs to be ready for.
Personally, I dug what this movie was doing. The continuous take was a cool move. I appreciate horror going for a level of difficulty that it didn't have to. The introduction of the childhood abuse is jolting and a little clunky but me knowing that it was coming made it less upsetting when it happened. It's a bummer that this seems to have killed the directors' careers, because between this and Open Water, they displayed a real talent for intimate and uncomfortable thrillers based on real life horrors rather than supernatural ones.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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