Silent House is a 2012 American horror film based on the Spanish language Uruguayan film, The Silent House. It is about a young woman staying in a lake house, who begins to notice paranormal, otherworldly activity.
The film is directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau and stars Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens.
Plot[]
A young woman named Sarah is staying at a dilapidated Victorian house in the countryside with her father and her uncle, helping them fix it up. Due to petty fighting between Sarah's uncle and her father, her uncle decides to take a break from working and drives into town to get tools. While her father works upstairs, there is a knock on the door and Sarah answers it, meeting a young woman named Sophia who claims to be one of Sarah's childhood friends, though Sarah does not remember her. The two plan to meet again later.
Soon after, Sarah hears strange noises upstairs and immediately notifies her father. He is not worried, but goes to check, finding nothing. Sarah calms down, but soon hears the sound of her father falling down the stairs. Panicked, Sarah searches for him and finds him unconscious, with a head wound. She tries to leave the house but all exits are locked or boarded up, and she hides from an unknown perpetrator who attempts to grab hold of her under a table. She then runs upstairs, where she discovers that her father's body has disappeared. She runs to the basement in search of the cellar door leading outside, and finds a bed and other human necessities, evidence that someone else has been living there, possibly squatters. She sees a figure shining a light in the basement to find her but she escapes out the cellar door.
Outside, she meets her uncle, who has returned, and sees a young girl on the side of the road who disappears before her eyes. They decide to go back to the house armed with a gun to rescue her father. They discover her father's body to be missing, and find a generator lamp running on the third floor of the house in a pool room. While searching the pool room, the generator kicks off; the only source of light available is a Polaroid camera's flash.
Through a series of incoherent camera flashes, Sarah sees the young girl in the room as well as an unidentifiable man. The power returns to reveal that her uncle is now missing. She is hiding under the pool table surrounded by two men taking pictures of an unseen girl on the top of the table, presumably pedophilic in nature. Sarah then sees her uncle's body being dragged by one of the men toward the staircase. She attempts unsuccessfully to shoot one of the men with her uncle's gun.
Sarah returns to her room to hide, and begins to exhibit signs of extreme paranoia, multiple personalities, and insanity. She has hallucinations of reality and alternate realities that depict traumatic childhood events; including a blood stain appearing on her bed, a young girl in the bathtub with beer bottles and bloody water, and a toilet spewing blood. These vivid hallucinations send Sarah into a state of hysteria, and she returns downstairs.
In the foyer, she is confronted by Sophia, and finds her now conscious father wrapped in plastic, sitting up in the living room. Sophia vanishes, and Sarah's father convinces her to untie him, at which point he slaps her and then begins to whip her with his belt. At the same time, her uncle regains consciousness and tries to stop her father, who mocks his brother's pleas. As his back is turned, Sarah kills him with a sledgehammer. Her uncle begs for mercy and tells her he should have stopped the rape and abuse that went on at the hands of her father. Sarah leaves him and walks outside silently and the film fades to black. In the end, the father turns out to be a rapist.
Cast[]
- Elizabeth Olsen as Sarah
- Adam Trese as John
- Eric Sheffer Stevens as Peter
- Julia Taylor Ross as Sophia
- Adam Barnett as Stalking Man
- Haley Murphy as Little Girl
Videos[]
