La casa muda
***½/****
starring Florencia Colucci, Abel Tripaldi, Gustavo Alonso, María Salazar
screenplay by Oscar Estévez
directed by Gustavo Hernández
RUBBER
½*/****
starring Stephen Spinella, Roxanne Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux
by Walter Chaw Billed as being filmed in a
single shot (though the skeptical--and those taken in by the "unedited"
long takes of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men--should
wonder why an editor is credited), Gustavo Hernández's zero-budget
conceptual experiment The Silent House (La
casa mudi) has found a way not only to suggest a gimmick
successfully carried through, but also to weave that gimmick into a
richer thematic tapestry. Here, the digital camera isn't carried by a
protagonist, Blair Witch-like, but instead floats
around the victim of the movie's horrors, one Laura (Florencia
Colucci), who's endeavouring with father Wilson (Gustavo Alonso) to
clean up an old abandoned house in preparation of its sale. The camera
does take on the point-of-view of someone at some point, then jumps
back to an objective place, then plays that trick Evil Dead
II
plays with perspective in the scene where
Ash wakes up in a clearing and looks around in a panning 360-degree
take, only for the audience to discover that the camera eye is both
character and commentator, more physical in its way than a first-person
point-of-view could ever be. In a genre dependent on cutting for its
scares, in fact, The Silent House's accomplishments
are all the more impressive. It's suffocating (I'd never considered how
liberating edits were from a
complete immersion into a film) and at times unbearably tense--and
though some will point to the airlessness of Hitch's Rope
or the fluid choreography of Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark,
The Silent House is a different
beast altogether.