US film-makers who scored a surprise hit in 2003 with a terrifying tale of two divers lost at sea are back with a spine-chilling film about a woman driven to terror inside her own house.
Their earlier film... was made on a tiny budget but brought in more than $38 million around the world
Chris Kentis and Laura Lau struck box office success nine years ago with Open Water, a watch-through-your-fingers movie about a couple left adrift in shark-infested waters when they are forgotten by their diving tour boat.
In Silent House, which has just been released in the US, the directors take a similarly stripped-down plot but weave in an edge-of-the-seat tale of horror about a young woman trapped inside her family’s lakeside retreat.
Their earlier film, which evoked terror whole showing almost nothing other than what was going on in the water around the abandoned divers, was made on a tiny budget but brought in more than $38 million around the world.Movie studios were quick to take the young film-makers on board, but for much of the last decade they couldn’t find a project that suited their particular talents – until Silent House.
“We had a couple of big projects, we kind of got into the (trap of) indie film-makers who go to Hollywood and get caught up in development and bigger budgets and the economy,” Ms Lau said.
“We couldn’t get something off the ground and it was very frustrating.”
Then last year producer Agnes Mentre, a big fan of Open Water, suggested they make a US version of La Casa Muda (The Silent House), a Uruguayan horror movie from 2010.
“We had no idea what it was, and she said it’s a single shot, and instantly we were very excited about this challenge,” said co-director Mr Kentis.
The film tells the story of Sarah – played by Elizabeth Olsen, 23, much sought-after since she appeared in the independent Martha Marcy May Marlene – who finds herself trapped inside a house she is restoring with her father. She is unable to contact the outside world, as events become increasingly ominous in and around the house. Ms Lau noted that the original film was based on a true story that dealt with bodies that were found in a house where incest was involved.
“The original stayed away from that. The first question I asked myself was why do you end up with dead bodies. For people to kill people there must be some very serious damage and sickness going on in a family,” she said.
As in Open Water, the film is told from the viewpoint of the main characters.
“It’s a matter of experiencing what takes place in this period of time, what this girl is going through, exclusively through her eyes,” Mr Kentis said.
The pair used long, unbroken camera shots – the 90-minute movie is made up of a series of more than 10-minute continuous shots – to intensify the action.
“For the actors, it was definitely hard, especially for Lizzie, because not only does she have to bring this really damaged, complex character, but she has a lot of technical things to remember as well,” said Ms Lau.
“It was very challenging.”
But from the film-makers’ point of view, the technique was perfect.
“This movie is the portrait of a very damaged person, and because of her mental illness, her sense of reality is fragmented, her identity is fragmented and her sense of time is discontinuous,” said Ms Lau. “Because we’re following her in real time, we are able to follow exactly what the experience of that is,” she added.
Mr Kentis added: “It was a daunting thing to take on, and I think I learned a kind of a new way of communicating, new kind of tools as far as how you can communicate cinematically.”