The Silent House (La casa muda) – Movie Review
The Silent House
Plot: The plot is based on a true story that happened in the late 40’s in a small village in Uruguay. The film focuses on Laura, who, second by second, intends to leave a house which hides an obscure secret, unharmed. Laura and her father Wilson settle down in a cottage they have to renew since its owner will soon put the house up for sale. They will spend the night there and repair the following morning. Everything seems to go smoothly until Laura hears a sound that comes from outside and gets louder and louder on the upper floor of the house. Wilson goes up to see what is going on while she remains downstairs on her own, waiting for her father to come down.
My Thoughts: I had watched the preview for this movie and thought to myself “No way I will watch this movie, it looks way to scary for me.” Well then I decided to suck it up and watch the movie. This movie was supposedly shot in one continuous take on a Canon 50D, which adds to a little bit of the element of horror because it makes it seem a little more realistic. I will discuss my thoughts on the continuous take later on. Right now I will focus on the acting of the movie.
Florencia Colucci was very good, granted I had to rely on subtitles but she played the innocent scared girl very well by facial expressions and just the tones in her language and voice. Other than her, the movie is simple with the cast, not many people to stand out but of course they were all still good.
The effects of the movie, they were simply what they needed to be, this movie didn’t really need to be flashy or fancy or anything along those lines so it got the job done for sure, don’t have many complaints about that.
The plot of the movie, it may seem mysterious to everyone for the first 50 minutes of this short movie which I felt was good because it sort of kept everyone guessing until the end of the movie. I still didn’t fully grasp it because I might of missed a line of dialogue, or line or subtitle since I didn’t understand the language.
Now the whole one shot discussion, I am going to give my two cents on that.
- All Canon camera’s have a time limit for videos, that time limit is usually 12 minutes. There are of course ways to get around the time limit, by connecting your camera to an external hard drive and have it film directly onto that.
- Editing does not take much, if there is a still shot on something for more than 1 second, creative editing could be done, which there are a few still shots
- If it goes dark, easy enough to assume that you could edit that to make it flow seamlessly. Which there is a lot of this movie that is in the dark.
