Runtime: 86 minutes
Directed by: Gustavo Hernandez
Starring: Florencia Colucci, Abel Tripaldi, Gustavo Alonzo
From: Tokio Films
No, this is not the 2011 American remake (Silent House) with Elizabeth Olsen, which in general went over like a fart in church. I hope that isn't actually worse than the original (from Uruguay) as The Silent House isn't too good, as I explained below:
I enjoy this one month out of a year gimmick where people watch foreign films. It's fun to (unofficially) participate and it's always interesting for me to see flicks from unfamiliar places. It's not rare for me to see something from the UK or Far East Asia or Italy... it's entirely different to see pictures from places like North Korea, Senegal, Tajikistan, Bahrain, Uganda, or Israel. In this case, I haven't ever seen anything from Uruguay before; the remake has not been seen by me either... I just know that most people hate it. Then again, this movie has never been that popular either...
Using a shot in one take gimmick (but it's faux a la Birdman)-much to its detriment-a young woman is with her dad and they are spending the night in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere so they can start renovating the next morning... only for things to go wrong and the young woman-Laura-to be in a lot of trouble.
Personally, I thought the one take gimmick did not work for this movie, like at all. The fact that the movie is hardly horrifying or even slightly chilling aside from a few moment is a big problem, but so is the real time gimmick. It results in plenty of boring moments where Laura wanders around the house with a lantern... even though you see later there's still enough light outside where it's not night time. Maybe the windows were boarded shut, I don't know... if it would have been scary that thought wouldn't even be in my mind, or if we knew much of anything about the few characters that are in the movie. What we get instead are long stretches that even Ti West may find to be boring as s---.
On another site, I saw a review which made me laugh; the reviewer was somehow befuddled by the plot. While things aren't spoonfed to you, once you piece together what's going on, it's not hard to figure out at all. The fact that this was someone reviewing it for a site that people in general know (comingsoon.net) makes it all the more hilarious to me. The general idea of the plot was not bad to me and the big twist in the plot was not a big issue to me either; like I said, a lot of it being boring and not so scary and the characters being total blank slates are the big issues.
I wish I could have liked this movie more; after all, the cast tries their best with what they had to work with and if done in a different way it could have been pretty cool. As the remake keeps the shot in one take gimmick, I will presume it's as not good as most people say it is. Hopefully one day I'll see a movie from Uruguay that I think is at least passable.
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