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Don’t Watch This at Home!

| Print | E-mail Written by Nina Allan Sunday, 08 May 2011

Something Rotten In The State Of Denmark

La Casa Muda/The Silent House 2010 dir Gustavo Hernandez starring Florencia Colucci, Abel Tripaldi, Gustavo Alonso 86 mins

“What’s going on in this house?” asks Laura, the central character in the startling new horror film from Uruguay, The Silent House. It’s a reasonable question in an unreasonable situation and as viewers we feel every sympathy with it. But we might do better to ask who exactly is haunting whom?

The Silent House sets itself up as a typical haunted house story. A father and daughter arrive at an isolated house as night is falling. The house is near-derelict, the windows are boarded over, and there is no electricity. The house’s owner, Nestor, arrives, and we learn that father Wilson and daughter Laura have been hired to do some clearing up in preparation for putting the property on the market.

Nestor lets them in and then drives away. Wilson and Laura make themselves as comfortable as they can in the Spartan surroundings, intending to begin their work first thing in the morning. No sooner have they settled down to sleep than a loud banging noise is heard from the upper floor. Laura, frightened, demands that her father go and investigate. Wilson takes the torch and creeps upstairs. Shortly afterwards we hear a sudden cry, a lot more banging, and then an ominous silence. We’re less than twenty minutes into the film, and Laura has already become the ‘final girl,’ alone in the dark in a place where bad things are clearly going to happen. As horror fans we’ve seen dozens of similar scenarios and should face little trouble in working out what comes next. But a large part of what makes The Silent House such an intriguing and engrossing film is that things are not as they seem.

Laura makes a couple of rather half-hearted attempts to get out of the house, but discovers that both the front door and the back door are locked against her. There’s more thumping and banging from the upper storey, and now there’s something else, the music of a children’s choir being played on a radio or stereo from one of the bedrooms. It seems that we’re going upstairs, whether we like it or not. What we find there is not wholly unexpected: the dead body of Laura’s father. Wilson is covered in blood, and has been stabbed. We wait with Laura in the darkness, armed only with a rusty scythe, listening to the sounds of the house and trying desperately to work out where the unknown assailant might be hiding. And this is where things start to get strange. When the attacker finally strikes we glimpse him only for a second – just long enough for us to recognise him as someone we know.

The ‘silent house’ of the title is not just literally silent, empty of inhabitants. It is silent because it refuses to divulge its secrets. It is a closed box, a mobius strip of a house. There are only so many rooms you can enter, and each leads you inexorably back to where you started. The plot, apparently simple, is deeply ambiguous, a strange and disturbing story where even its weaker elements – why do Wilson and Laura go upstairs when Nestor has warned them not to? Why does Laura make so little effort to escape the house, and shouldn’t she be more affected by the sight of her dead father? – turn out to reinforce it. What started out as a ghost story is actually a revenge tragedy - only suddenly it decides it’s a ghost story after all. Even when we think we’ve guessed its meaning there is one final twist. Who is haunting whom indeed. Even in its final seconds the film is still one step ahead of us.

The plot’s ambiguities are also reinforced by the look of the piece. The film is shot in colour, but there is so little colour to see that it may as well be in black and white. Although the opening scenes of the film take place in daylight, dusk is falling, and aside from one brief, almost shocking burst of colour, the purple clematis flowers cloaking a wooden pergola, everything has a faded quality, the colour leached away, as in a photograph left standing in harsh sunlight. The house itself forms a contradiction. It is clear that no one has lived there for years, and yet it is still full of things. Furniture, crockery, books, ornaments, even a telephone, all swathed in dust and yet exactly as they must have been when the house was last occupied. Nothing has been changed or moved. As with the Mary Celeste, it is as if whoever lived there did not leave of their own accord, but was spirited away by forces unknown. The fact that we perceive all this only dimly, by the unsteady light of an oil lamp, only serves to deepen this sense of mystery.

It is clear that some of the objects in the house – a rag doll, a child’s rattle, the radio, a rosary – have particular significance and might provide us with clues to what has happened here. The camera lingers over these things, has Laura illuminate them for us with her oil lantern. And yet the camera is also a trickster. It shifts its focus constantly, between foreground and background, objects and faces, light and darkness, leading us on and thwarting us, throwing us into confusion. We’re not sure what we’re meant to be looking at. More than that, we’re not sure who might be looking at us.

Reflected images play a huge part in the look and atmosphere of La Casa Muda. There are dusty mirrors everywhere in the house, hanging on walls, leaning in corners, shrouded by sheets. On at least three significant occasions we observe the action of the film at one remove – as a reflection in a mirror. Not only is this hugely disquieting, it is thematically interesting, especially as it is only Laura who seems to cast a reflection.

There are other duplicated images too, in the paintings Laura discovers in one of the rooms upstairs, and most notably in the Polaroid photographs that appear as a recurring motif throughout the course of the film. Early on, we observe Laura examining an odd little photo album, half-filled with blurred snapshots of what appear to be rooms in the house. We have no idea why they were taken, much less why anyone would decide to preserve them in an album. Later we find out, at least in part. There are more Polaroid snaps too, less ambiguous than the others. What is it about Polaroid that makes it so sinister? The Silent House is by no means alone in picking up on this. Noted photographers – Andrei Tarkovsky and Stephen Shore to name but two – have frequently resorted to the use of the Polaroid when they want to highlight seediness, transience, oddness, the isolated moment frozen as it disappears. Stephen King wrote about the Polaroid at length in his marvellous novella The Sun Dog. He seemed particularly caught up with the noise the camera makes as it takes a photograph – King called it ‘that squeaky little whine.’ I think that here again the secret lies in the matter of contradiction. Here we are in the modern age, the age of digital photography and cellphone cameras. And yet in La Casa Muda we’re forced to make do with this cumbersome mechanical artefact, obsolete almost at the moment it became popular, a camera that vomits out its images, taken when we’re most off guard, images we might sooner forget. When linked with ideas such as these, the very sight of the Polaroid becomes ominous.

Perhaps this is the moment to mention that this film is frightening. I say this as someone who has loved the horror genre from the moment she first learned to say monster and so has an honourable number of horror films under her belt. Nonetheless there were several times during this movie that I found myself feeling relieved that I was watching it in a crowded cinema auditorium and not by myself at home. And it’s not just a matter of the short, sharp shock; the tension persists, from the opening image of the man and the girl stumbling through the overgrown grass right up until the final credits. In a film as quiet and understated as this, that’s a real achievement.

As the film opens a brief subtitle informs us that the story we are about to see is based on true events. I’ve done some research into this, but aside from the repeated statement that The Silent House was inspired by an incident that happened near a village in Uruguay in the 1940s I have been unable to ascertain whether this is a fact, or whether it is a fiction within a fiction, similar to the infamous St Valentine’s Day outing in Picnic at Hanging Rock. This didn’t matter to me in terms of the story, but it did add to the movie’s mystique. The other notable fact I kept reading about the film was that it was shot in a single take, one unbroken scene without cuts or edits lasting 78 minutes. I found myself looking out for this at first, on the watch for little breaks in continuity that might suggest that this too was a subterfuge, but I became so caught up in the story I quickly forgot about it. It was only later, once the film had ended, that I found myself enjoying that aspect in retrospect as I realised that aside from one separate two-minute ‘coda’ the movie had indeed played itself out in real time. This also marks a considerable achievement.

The fact that The Silent House has a deliberately amateurish quality, that it was shot with a hand-held camera, that it purports to show ‘real’ events, will lead to inevitable comparisons with movies such as The Blair Witch Project, which have made effective use of similar techniques. While it is true that there are similarities, and that one of the reasons I was keen to see this film was that I am a serious fan of ‘hand-held horror,’ I believe there are important distinctions. What films like Blair Witch, [Rec], Cloverfield, and most recently Paranormal Activity and The Last Exorcism have in common is that we know who is behind the camera. In each of these films, the act of making the film is itself a part of the movie. This not only makes everything seem more immediate, it also makes us feel complicit, at one with the characters, almost as if we are sharing the film making process. We feel in sympathy with the leading characters as a result of this, and strangely bereft at the end of the film if – as so often! – their movie-making venture ends in death or disaster.

The Silent House is different. There is no attempt to persuade us as viewers that what we are watching is an artefact recovered at a disaster site or the final video testament of persons now missing, no one acknowledges our presence behind the fourth wall. There is a film score, a cast of characters. What we are watching has been made, not found. So why the jerky camerawork, the endlessly shifting focus? These things suggest the presence of another, a third party who is as aware of us and yet refuses to reveal himself. There is none of the cosy camaraderie of The Blair Witch Project or The Last Exorcism. Instead we are made to feel like spies, spies who may also be spied upon, and the effect is decidedly unsettling.

Indeed, much of the power of this film lies in the fact that the story it tells is actually much darker than you think. There are those that like to think of the haunted house story as comfortably old fashioned, but La Casa Muda, with its contemporary concerns, its modern dress and its refusal to succumb to easy definitions, is very much a ghost story for our times.

My name is Nina Allan. You may know me as a writer of horror fiction and contemporary fantasy. As I’ve stated in this review, I’ve been in love with the horror genre from a worryingly young age, and have become increasingly evangelistic about it as the years go by. Horror, fantasy, speculative fiction of all stripes and allegiances has at its heart the passion and desire to convey the distilled essence of what it is to be human. It asks questions the more mainstream genres shy away from. Most importantly of all, it doesn’t give a damn what people think. It’s no wonder then that horror writers and film makers have produced some of the most enduring stories and memorable images in the canon. I'd say my truest enthusiasm lies within the realm of 'high end' horror - films such as Guillermo del Toro’s fabulous Cronos, Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout, and more recent classics-to-be such as Let the Right One In, Never Let Me Go and We Are What We Are. I love horror that delivers both in genre terms and in terms of cinematic experience. I don't like Hollywood cliches - but a well-made mainstream horror with more than a hint of irony such as Sam Raimi's irresistible Drag Me to Hell can certainly get me smiling! In this column I want to take a closer look at movies and books that reach the parts that other films and stories don’t always reach, with a leaning towards horror from around the world. Some will be new releases, some will be neglected classics; all will be worth your while. We’re going to make some new discoveries together. I hope you enjoy the journey.