Laura (Florencia Colucci) and her father (Gustavo Alonso) help their
friend Nestor (Abel Tripaldi) to clean out his house. While Nestor is gone
for some supplies, Laura and her dad do a bit of scouting around - which
is when Laura hears all sorts of spooky noises. Her dad claims he doesn't
hear anything ... but then he ends up dead. Laura wants to leave the place
at any cost, but she has to realize she's locked in - and what's worse,
the killer is locked in with her. Laura tries to run, but one room seems
to be more creepy than the next, and it all seems to have to do with a
child - and with Laura, as she finds a whole wall plastered with photos of
herself. Finally, Laura finds the housekey and runs right into the arms
of Nestor, who has just come back with supplies, blissfully unaware of
what has happened. He thinks Laura is just hysteric and forces her to
accompany him into the house - bad mistake, because once in the house,
Laura stabs him to death. Turns out that Laura was the baddie of the
piece all along, that she actually had killed her own father, too. Thing
is, she and Nestor once were lovers, but then she got pregnant and he
forced her to abort, and her father backed him up - and was running a sex
ring with Nestor behind her back. With Nestor and daddy gone, Laura
falls a world of illusions where she and her (never born) daughter go to
visit granny ... Technically, this film is almost brilliantly
made: It's shot in very few shots (the filmmakers claim the body of the
movie is shot in one single continuous shot, but I have my doubts - not
that it really matters), but the pictures are carefully set up throughout,
the whole thing is perfectly timed to create tension, suspense and
atmosphere in all the right spots, and totally without the help of rapid
fire editing, dynamics, hectic and the like are created when they're
supposed to. Plus, Florencia Colucci really manages to carry the film,
actingwise. However, La Casa Muda is also a far-from-perfect
film, mainly because its insistence on doing everything in one single shot
makes no sense, narratively. Basically, if Laura was really the killer of
her father, than next to nothing of what happened in the movie was what
actually happened, it was all in her mind ... and yet, shooting in one
single shot suggests special immediacy and realism (while editing suggests
a bendable truth) - which in the end leaves you totally unsure about what
you have actually seen. And thus, with the revelation that Laura was
actually the killer, the movie loses you, and much of what was previously
achieved goes up in smoke. Too bad, a technical achievement like this
would have deserved better ...
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