I reviewed the original, Uruguayan film La Casa Muda a little while ago.
If you’re interested, you can read the review here. I enjoyed that movie, but I was left with
quite a few questions. But I now have a
theory that could explain my problems with that film (and this one, as well). I’ll get to that in a bit.
The set-up is the same, but the names are different. Sarah, her father (John), and her uncle
(Peter) are trying to fix up their old house in the country in an attempt to
sell it. As they walk through the house,
we see just how dilapidated it really is.
John and Peter get into an argument, and Peter storms out of the house. With John upstairs, Sarah hears a knock on
the door and finds a girl named Sophia, who is about her age. Sophia tells her that they used to be
friends, although Sarah doesn’t seem to remember her. They agree to meet up later, and Sophia
leaves.
Sarah heads back upstairs to help her dad. When he goes into the next room, she hears a
strange noise and goes to check it out.
She eventually finds him unconscious on the floor with blood coming out
of his head. And then it’s on.
She freaks out (naturally). She
hears footsteps and hides. She never
really seems to get a good look at the intruder, but it appears to be a fairly
large man (6’3”, 250 lbs) wearing camouflage gear and face paint. (He is credited as “Stalking Man”, which
seems appropriate.)
She tries to escape the house, but runs into a myriad of problems. The front door is locked from the inside by a
key that has gone missing. The windows
are boarded up. The exit from the
basement is locked by a padlock. And so
on. So Sarah finds herself trapped in
this house with a very imposing, very stealthy man stalking her.
There was a main difference between the original and this version at
this point. In the original, one of my
complaints was that she was being stalked, yet she spent quite a bit of time
investigating the rooms of the house without paying any attention to anything
else, often with her back to the door.
It was frustrating. This version
didn’t have that. Sarah seemed
legitimately scared the entire time, and didn’t find herself distracted by any
flights of fancy. Her sole goal was to
find a way out of the house, and then find help for her father.
Eventually she escapes, just in time to find Uncle Peter driving up to
the house. She tells him what is going
on, and, against her wishes, he rushes into the house, leaving her in the car
by herself. (This was a pretty tense
scene, and I’m pretty sure I jumped. But
I did not scream like a girl. Because I
don’t do those sorts of things.) She
follows him into the house, and, before too long, she finds herself trapped in
the house with two unconscious relatives.
Good plan, Uncle Peter.
And it goes on from there. She’s
scared. She tries to escape. She is chased. And so on, and so forth. Let’s break into a bit of spoiler territory.
[SPOILER]
Just like in La Casa Muda,
Sarah finds that there is no one in the house.
As a young girl, she was sexually abused by her father, and one of her
other personalities is the one actually dishing out the beatings. All of this is completely unknown to Sarah,
but she figures it out eventually (in this version, Sophia – one of her
personalities – is the one that fills her in on the details).
But there are some differences.
In La Casa Muda, you know for
a fact that she was raped. She even had
a daughter who was later killed in an attempt to cover it up. In Silent
House, they never say that she was raped.
All we know for sure is that her father would strip her down and take
sexually explicit photographs of her. We
also know that her uncle was present for some of these events, but that he
eventually begged her father to stop.
Either way, there was some messed up stuff going on in that house, and
she was well within her rights to seek revenge.
Now, for my theory: in my review of La
Casa Muda, I talked about how it didn’t make any sense that the camera
followed Sarah around for the entire movie in one continuous shot, yet we never
saw her attack her father and uncle.
“How could she attack them when she was in the frame the entire time?” I believe that the camera was following only
Sarah’s point of view, not the point of view of Sophia or the Stalking Man, or
even the little girl who popped up from time to time. Since it wasn’t the Sarah personality that
was doing the attacking, we didn’t see it.
It seems like a simple concept, yet I didn’t grasp that at all on my
first viewing. That’s on me. I guess I need to watch more movies.
[END SPOILER]
Overall, I really liked this.
Having seen La Casa Muda
already, I pretty much knew where this movie was heading, but even then there
were a handful of moments that freaked me out.
It’s difficult to say which movie I liked better, but, for now, I’ll say
that I enjoyed this version slightly more than La Casa Muda. I would
attribute that to the fact that Sarah was always focused on eluding her
attacker, while Laura (the lead in La
Casa Muda) would often take little breaks to look at things in the
house. That same level of frustration
was not present in this movie, which was nice.
For such a small movie like this to work, the acting has to be
terrific. And it was. Elizabeth Olsen was tremendous as Sarah. Seeing as how the camera followed her for the
entire movie, a lesser actress could have really submarined this movie. But she really carried this, and it was quite
impressive to watch.
It’s rolling around to fall.
October is right around the corner.
Pumpkin ales are popping up at grocery stores. The mood is right for horror movies. Do yourself a favor and check this one
out. It moves pretty quickly, has a
number of legitimately creepy moments, and quite a few effective
jump-scares. This is the movie I had
hoped The Strangers would be.
Rating: 5/5
