Fresh from her surprise triumph in Martha Marcy May Marlene, Elizabeth Olsen plays a skittish lass named Sarah who accompanies her father (Adam Trese) and her Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) to a dark, deserted summer house on the edge of a lake where the two boys played when they were young. Her job: to pack up the decaying contents of the old abandoned family home in the middle of the woods for resale. Mold cakes the walls. Cell phones don’t work. All they have to light the darkness is lantern-shape flashlights. Then the spooky noises begin. The doors lock, and there’s no way out. The first of many challenges to logic: why do they begin packing up the boxes in the dark? Why don’t they come back the next day, when the sun is shining and they can see what they’re doing? The questions are just beginning.

For the first half hour of a movie so slow it seems to be fueled by liquid Valium, there are only the sounds—footsteps, creaking door hinges, punctuated by Ms. Olsen’s screams. Like The Haunting, the goose bumps come from what is heard and implied—not what is shown or described. The father keeps disappearing, ending up in a pool of blood. The uncle runs away, only to return and get knocked out with a brain concussion. The claustrophobic setting—dark rooms littered with clutter—has a deleterious effect on Ms. Olsen that is the only thing in the movie that makes any sense. Shot mostly in annoying close-ups, the blurry camerawork from drunken hand-held video cams doesn’t add chills. It only causes night blindness. Eventually, the only light is from the flash bulbs in a Polaroid camera. The three characters (and one hallucination) in Silent House lack even the most fundamental pretense to characterization, but it is clear that the two men are up to no good and Ms. Olsen is more (or less) than what she appears to be. Who is she and where has she been for so long that her father and uncle don’t seem to know her? No spoilers, but she seems mad from the start, and it’s apparent that she’s an expert with a shotgun for reasons that have nothing to do with finishing school.

The movie’s one claim to self-importance is its claim to be shot in real time, in one take, but you couldn’t prove it to me. Mainly, it’s another tour de force performance by Ms. Olsen with a maximum display of eye-rolling hysteria, a bare minimum of dialogue and no visible help from a director with any ability to prolong suspense. You can’t condemn Silent House for even being contrived. A contrived plot heads in different directions, no matter how obvious. Like a turtle with a missing toe, this one is incapable of going anywhere, so it never moves at all.

rreed@observer.com

SILENT HOUSE

Running Time 85 minutes

Written by Gustavo Hernández (based on the film by) and Laura Lau (screenplay)

Directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens

Quiet Car of the Acela Regional Express as it rolled out of Boston's South

Station on Friday, July 30, when a slightly rumpled guy boarded the train, a

Democratic National Convention credential still slung around his neck.

The man began talking-quite loudly-about Senator John Kerry's

speech the night before, and how great he thought Barack Obama's speech had

been earlier in the week. Did he have fun? someone asked him. Yeah, "but I

worked my ass off!" he shouted. It soon became clear that the one loud man in

the otherwise quiet Quiet Car was none other than Al Franken: comedian,

Bush-basher and all-around loudmouth.

The train announcer-and the other passengers-were not impressed.

A little bell rang, and a heavily Boston-accented voice boomed through the

loudspeaker: "THIS IS THE QUIET CAR! If you're sitting in THE QUIET CAR, you

can't use cell phones and conversation must be kept to a minimum!" When the

announcer stopped, the passengers started in on Mr. Franken. One walked up to

him and made it clear that the announcement was meant for him. "O.K., O.K.,"

Mr. Franken said. "SHHHH!" said another man, sitting a few rows behind the

comedian. Then the announcer came on again, just as loudly, reminding

passengers to live up to the Quiet Car's name.

Asked about it later by The Transom, Mr. Franken seemed rather

humbled. "I didn't know it was a Quiet Car," he replied. "I was stupid. But

when I got shushed, I shut up. For the next three hours and 27 minutes, I

didn't make any loud noises. I went in between the cars to make a phone call."

-Rachel Donadio

Dubya's Double

John Sayles, join the club. With his newest film, Silver City -a sardonic account of a

fictional Colorado gubernatorial candidate from a prominent political dynasty

caught in an election-year scandal-the writer/director is the latest filmmaker

hoping to unseat the Bush administration.

"What you hope is that some of these documentaries, as they're

coming out now, and a fiction film like Silver

City don't have to be post-mortem," Mr. Sayles said over the phone from his

New York office about the timing of the film's release. "That they can help

people, through getting into the conversation, make decisions that will stop

things that are negative, that will turn things in a better direction."

The film is a political thriller with the tone of Barry

Levinson's 1997 political lampoon Wag the

Dog . Since it will be released on Sept. 17, as the election really begins

to heat up, Mr. Sayles hopes that the subject matter will draw a large and

varied audience. He also hopes to attract more than just the liberal choir with

a well-known cast: Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Daryl Hannah, Tim Roth,

Maria Bello, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Zane. Mr. Cooper plays the bumbling,

verbally challenged Richard (Dickie) Pilager, a reformed political neophyte who

was modeled, in part, after the current President.

"The lexicon is closer to Bush than other politicians I could

name, but it's not really an impression," said Mr. Sayles. However, he added,

"They're unavoidable parallels."

But like a character in his breakthrough film Return of the Secaucus 7 , Mr. Sayles

remains an aged idealist with no illusions regarding the impact of his work.

"You don't expect a single movie to change the conversation

totally," he said. "But you do want it to be part of the conversation and get

people asking questions."

According to Mr. Sayles, not only is the American population at

large ignorant of the corruptive influence of big-money lobbyists, but the

media does very little to "connect the dots" and inform the public. The film,

which is a dark comedy, is meant to motivate the audience to question the

actions of elected officials.

"What you hope is that people can extrapolate a little bit," he

said. "Shit doesn't just happen. It happened because someone made it happen."

-Jake Brooks

Shark Bait

At a time when computer-generated effects are turning action

movies into high-budget video games, director Chris Kentis was striving for

realism in his shockumentary film Open

Water .

He succeeded all too well.

On the first day of filming, lead actress Blanchard Ryan was

bitten by a barracuda. "I was horrified!" said Mr. Kentis. "Here I'd spent

months assuring her that she'd be completely safe swimming with sharks, and

then I look over and there's blood in the water." Luckily Ms. Ryan was the

consummate professional. "All she cared about was whether we'd gotten it on

camera or not. I'd missed the shot."

When the film bobbed into a Chelsea cinema for its premiere on

Monday night, there was no missing the similarities to another terrifying indie

production, The Blair Witch Project .

It's a parallel that producer Laura Lau, who is married to Mr. Kentis, is eager

to dispel. "We understand why the comparisons to Blair Witch have come up-both Sundance movies, video camera, scary,

unknown-but we were trying to do something very different. Blair Witch was pretty much a horror movie. We were not setting out

to make a horror movie."

Nevertheless, Blair Witch co-director

Eduardo Sanchez considers himself a fan of the fin-slasher, and drove up from

his home in Washington, D.C., to attend the premiere. "I e-mailed Laura [Lau]

after Sundance congratulating her, and we became online friends," he explained.

He joined the cast for the

after-party at Coral Room, where an Asian "mermaid" writhed in a tank behind

the bar while waiters with scuba masks perched on their heads scurried about

delivering canapés to the ravenous crowd.

The Transom asked actor Daniel Travis whether he'd suffered any

lingering physical effects post-production. "Shrinkage issues!" he laughed.

"Yeah, we intended initially to shoot interiors after we'd finished the water

sequence, but we were so beaten-up-looking that Chris took one look at us and

said, 'We gotta go home and chill out.' It took about a week to recover my

horizon line and get my fingers to plump back out again."

"These brown patches on my forehead will probably never go away,"

said his co-star, Blanchard Ryan, her fingers anxiously wiping the area above

her eyebrows. "And I still have dreams about the water. It's not even

nightmares, it's not even the sharks-I just feel like I'm still in the water.

It's that point of view of seeing the water around you for day after day after

day for all those hours. It's haunting."

Ms. Ryan, who admits that she still doesn't venture over her

knees in the water ("I'm very apprehensive about the animals in the ocean!"),

has no trouble suspending her disbelief.

"During the screening at the Maui Film Festival, this shark came

out of nowhere and I jumped out of my skin. My boyfriend was like, 'How can you

jump? You were there!'"

How did she endure all those hours bobbing around in the cold

ocean?

"I would always say to myself, 'Look how lucky I am. I'm in the

middle of this beautiful Caribbean paradise, I'm not stuck in an office

somewhere in midtown, I'm the luckiest girl on earth!' And then I'd be like, 'I

don't care! I'm cold and I'm scared and I want to get in the boat!'"

-Noelle Hancock

Water. If asked to name my most chilling fear, I would have to admit that right up there next to snakes, Nazis and bankruptcy, I have always had a mortal anxiety about water. Not the kind that comes in designer bottles or picture-postcard waterfalls. I'm talking oceans, seas, rivers and all the creepy stuff below that sucks, bites, stings and chews human torsos for hors d'oeuvres. I wouldn't go deep-sea diving on a dare, and if you don't think a simple scuba dive in a placid Caribbean coral reef is a pursuit for the insane, you will change your mind after Open Water . Based on true events, this is a movie about a vital, healthy, appealing and attractive couple, Daniel and Susan (Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan), who escape the stress of urban chaos to spend some quality time together on holiday in a beach resort. They sign up for a diving excursion. What happens next left me paralyzed with the kind of terror I can only equate with coming face to face in the garden with a hungry crocodile.

The early-morning dive from a pilot boat looks enchanting to the 20 tourists in rubber diving suits onboard. Sixty feet below the surface, the angel fish are posing for marine calendars. The excursion is well organized. The deep-sea divers are divided into pairs. Nothing to worry about, says the guide. And there are wonders to behold that you don't see in an aquarium. Now it is 10:25, the appointed hour when everyone meets for the trip back to the island hotel. To their disbelief, when Daniel and Susan reach the surface, the pilot boat with the other vacationers has gone without them. Accidentally, because of a mistaken head count, two people have been left behind, deserted and alone, cold and shaking, kept afloat by life jackets, miles from civilization in shark-infested waters. Disbelief turns to anger-directed first at the excursion company, then at each other. These are resourceful people, but as the stages of psychologicalhorror progress,calm resolve surrenders to panic, hysteria and eventually a kind of resignation that left me shaken long after the final shattering moments of this extraordinary film. To stave off starvation and mental exhaustion, they play word games.Daniel tries to summon his slowly fading manhood with words of encouragement: "This really sucks, but we're going to get through this, O.K.?" But being left in the middle of the ocean is an ordeal for which nobody can prepare. Dehydrated, unable to drink the water, suffering from nausea caused by the drifting and rocking of the lapping waves, then tortured by both leg cramps and the venomous bites of passing jellyfish, they do everything possible to stay awake and alive. Alas, nature has other cruel plans. At the risk of spoiling the suspense, I will clam up here. Just take my word: Whatever you expect, you are in for much more.

Applause is richly deserved by the team of writer-director Chris Kentis and his producer wife Laura Lau. They shot this movie on weekends and holidays with the two accomplished, believable and completely mesmerizing actors plunged into the water without protective cages for over 120 hours, surrounded by real man-eating sharks that give the film most of its harrowing chills. There isn't one computer-generated special effect in the entire film, which gives the viewer even more of a feeling of being isolated and abandoned in the middle of nowhere. The Kentis' camera not only captures the vast backdrop against which man's vulnerability is supremely tested, but acts as a third character-the ocean current, the nose of a shark, the enemy that sweeps away the couple's camera, knife, food supplies and self-protection. As scary as it is in the sunlight, there is no way to evaluate the sheer horror of being in the water after dark, lit only by the moon or bolts of lightning. Which is worse? During the day, when the sky and the water are as white as an ultraviolet ray, you can see the churning of the sharks circling your head. In the pitch-black of night, you can only feel the things that are coming after you. Every aspect of this nightmare is captured as realistically as breathing by Mr. Kentis, while his screenplay miraculously finds the time to develop character and build rapport between the actors and the audience. You won't know Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis going in, but you will crave much more of them both by the time this momentous movie ends. To all and sundry, a moment of genuflection, please-for one of the most galvanizing and unforgettable films of the year.

Cat-astrophic Turn for Halle

As a head-turning player in the world of red-carpet photo ops and P.R. sound bites, Halle Berry may be pure catnip, but as a hissing, whip-cracking Catwoman , she's more like a rat buffet. In a desperate ploy to become the female competition for Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and any number of boring X-Men, this flashy, superficial, blinged-out comic-book superheroine comes crawling out of her cage on all fours in black leather panties and bra, like a self-respecting feminist's worst nightmare. Come to think of it, with its smoke and strobe lights and trashy hip-hop score, Catwoman is an intelligent moviegoer's worst nightmare, too.

Based on the least popular and most pointless comic-book character ever invented by Batman creator Bob Kane, Catwoman descends from the god-like cats of ancient Egypt, where cat mummies have been found in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. We know this from the elaborate credits, made up of vast historic, archival information about cats. By day she is Patience Phillips, a struggling graphic artist who slaves away drawing ads for a cosmetics conglomerate run by a sleazy opportunist (Lambert Wilson) and his lethal wife, a model for the company's beauty products who is being replaced because of her age (played with frozen relish by Sharon Stone). This marble-faced monster is a chic, streamlined viper who will stop at nothing to destroy her philandering husband and keep her face in the flossy, overstuffed pages of Vogue . When the film begins, Patience is already having a bad day-a mysterious cat has invaded her apartment and seems to be stalking her, she falls from a window and is saved from death by a handsome cop (Benjamin Bratt) who thinks she's a nut case, and she's forced to work overtime or get fired-and it's about to get worse. Delivering her new illustrations to the company's cosmetics lab, she overhears the evil Ms. Stone's plans for launching a new formula for anti-aging cream that contains addictive, life-threatening drugs that turn the skin beneath the collagen mask into cancerous sores. Holy Botox! Before she can escape and warn the women of the world about toxic beauty cream, Patience is drowned, resuscitated from her underwater grave by that creepy cat, and ready to start the next phase of her existence as … Catwoman!

If you've read this far without turning the page, maybe you also want to know that she crawls through the night robbing jewelry stores, scaling buildings and falling from great heights, always landing on her paws. There's no telling what she could do with a hot tin roof! In the process of stretching out a nonexistent plot, Ms. Berry also befriends an urban witch (Frances Conroy, the funeral-parlor matriarch on HBO's Six Feet Under , in the kind of supporting bit that used to be played by Gale Sondergaard), who diagnoses her condition and warns her that being a catwoman "can be both a blessing and a curse," then ravenously devours pounds of canned tuna and purrrrrrs like Eartha Kitt. Sometimes she kids her own predicament with lines fresh from the word processors of not one but three deluded screenwriters who deserve to remain nameless. (Inserting her talons into a villain's mouth, she hisses: "Cat got your tongue?") She's a pretty sloppy date in a trendy restaurant. Wait till you see what she does with sushi.

Catwoman is the kind of movie that almost guarantees the loss of a few I.Q. points. It has blinding strobe lights and a deafening New Age beat that consists of the worst rap music ever perpetrated on any member of the film going public over 14 years old, and culminates in a claw-and-fang fight to the death between Ms. Berry and Ms. Stone that really kicks butt. Violence and noise is about the extent of the talents of a director named simply "Pitof," who cut his baby teeth on French commercials, music videos and software designs. Christ, don't we have enough hacks right here at home already without importing new ones? Halle Berry slithers through most of this cinematic litterbox as scantily clad as possible in leather lingerie that is supposed to make her look empowered, but only makes her resemble a dominatrix in a low-budget porno flick. When she cracks her cat-o'-nine-tails in her skivvies, it's not exciting, just déjà vu . Ignorant of American film history, "Pitof" obviously doesn't even know that Ann-Margret did it all years ago in Kitten with a Whip . Lovely and lost, Halle Berry is capable of so much more. This kind of kitty litter no doubt earns the big bucks that generate high-fives for agents, managers, publicists and the I.R.S., but as a career move, Catwoman is a cat-astrophe.

Gangster Heaven

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is another of those sparse, restrained and suspensefully subdued gangster films by the celebrated British director Mike Hodges. Thirty years ago, he left an instant mark on the gangster genre with his stunning debut film, Get Carter , followed almost immediately by the zany, compelling Pulp (the last film I can remember that starred the alluring Lizabeth Scott). A few years ago, he garnered international critical attention once again with the offbeat Croupier . Now this idiosyncratic director returns with another stylized crime melodrama with faint echoes of Raymond Chandler, sex and thuggery unlimited. Smart, efficient and brutal, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is an avenging-angel film about a former kingpin of the London underworld named Will (Clive Owen, who starred in Mr. Hodges' Croupier ), who comes out of retirement and returns to his old haunts to avenge the death of his young, energetic and attractive younger brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a punk drug dealer who has been raped and murdered by a depraved car dealer, played by Malcolm McDowell. Davey's hero worship led him to follow in his older brother's footsteps, and now Will feels guilty. Growing from the status of a hermit living out of a van in the woods to a furious crime lord reuniting with his old gang and reclaiming his old power, Mr. Owen acts with a ferocious vengeance that gives his character an unrelenting authority. Eschewing the clichés of shoot-outs and bloodshed, the director focuses more on illogical underworld fatalism and the nocturnal landscape in which it thrives. You visit a London that is rarely seen by tourists-dank alleys, underpasses and cobblestone walkways lit only by a distant neon bar light or simply the moon hovering above the rotted, soot-scarred trees. It can be argued that I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is more stylized than substantive, but I found it a tight, well-made, evocative piece of filmmaking for true connoisseurs of gangster movies that is unnerving, yet completely sure of every step it takes.