Silent House

Olsen plays a young woman helping her father and uncle clean up their old abandoned house so that it can be sold. The electricity is out and the windows are boarded up, so they navigate the multi-story, no-light-zone with handheld lanterns even though it's the middle of the day. Nothing to be afraid of, until thumping noises coming from empty rooms disrupt the domestic task at hand, Dad and Uncle Whatshisname keep finding mysterious photographs that they won't show to Olsen, one of her childhood friends shows up and speaks cryptically about the past, Uncle Whatshisname runs off after arguing with Dad and then Dad disappears, too. And that leaves one woman all alone in a dark house.
But is she alone? Is there a stranger in the house? Where did everybody else go and why? What's real and what's not? And how come she can't seem to leave and just run off for help? The answers to those questions, as I mentioned earlier, require no real digging on the part of the audience because the film lurches to an intelligence-insulting halt in its final 15 minutes and makes literal everything that was suggested in the first 70 minutes, answers every "But what about...?" question you were mentally tallying and turns cathartic and obvious when ambiguity and sustained uncertainty would have been just fine. More than just fine -- necessary.

But Olsen is great, delivering a panicked, hyperventilating performance that'll remind you of Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark and the shrieking, under-appreciated Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. And for that first hour or so of unrelenting mystery and blackness, the movie itself, in the hands of Open Water directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, keeps its grip right around your throat. The last thing I was hoping for was an easy way out, for Olsen and for the audience. I'd rather leave a horror film feeling bad or creeped out than comforted and taught lessons about -- well, I can't exactly say. But trust, its ending is as annoying as its beginning and middle are frightening. What makes horror horrifying is unrelieved tension, so when that gets tossed out all you're left with is counting the minutes until it's over

 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1767382/