Silhouette is the story of Jack and Amanda Harms who, after the passing of their young daughter, set out into seclusion to begin their lives anew. Quickly upon their arrival, things go awry when the sins of their past come back to haunt them.

Directed by Mitch McLeod, the film starts with a married couple moving to a new home in order to make a fresh start. While they are getting settled in, wife Amanda (April Hartman) starts seeing and experiencing things that may or may not be there and the husband Jack (Tom Zembrod) simply thinks it’s just caused by stress. During this time we meet Dawn (Jessica Willis) a neighbor from down the street. The tension continues to build, albeit slowly, all throughout the movie until the rather abrupt yet surprising climax.

First things first, April Hartman is unbelievably talented. She masterfully conveyed the sense of pain and loss. Losing a child is an unthinkable fear of parents and she presented the aftermath of such fear come to life in heart-wrenching fashion. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the rest of the performances, though that could be due to material more than acting ability. This is very much Amanda’s story and as such, she is given the heavy lifting. Jack is given the standard “skeptic husband” and Tom Zembrod portrays the role fine while Jessica’s take on Dawn is more uneven. Some parts it seems like she forgot her lines or she was unsure of the direction the scene was going. Overall the acting was okay, save for April of course.

As the runtime rolls on, the cracks in the storytelling start to show. One part Thriller, one part Character Drama and one part Paranormal Horror. It becomes good at all of these but not great at any of them. An uneven experience is created by tonal shifts due to the different types of movie the film is trying to become there are also parts that seem to progress at a snail’s pace. This isn’t helped by the random parts of audio dropping so low that entire conversations can be missed but luckily this didn’t happen often enough to ruin the film, just enough to be an annoyance.

There was thought put into filming and the director is talented behind the camera. It shows with the use of lighting and framing of shots. Even at a lean 90 minutes, it felt as though an extra 10 or 15 minutes could have been shaved without missing any of the important beats.

Silhouette is in an odd place. It’s trying to tackle some very serious and very real subject matter without using it as a cheap ploy and overall it does succeed in this regard. Once the credits rolled, I was still talking about the performance of April and how emotional and raw it felt. But it was when other plot threads were added and seemingly dropped that the film started to suffer. Does it completely break under its own weight and ambition? Absolutely not, I would still recommend this movie for April Hartman’s role alone. There is a good movie under the missteps as long as you know that it’s not going to just be like every other haunted house film.