Joining the ranks of my favorite thrillers, Hush is the less-than-novel mashup of some major home invasion films that delivers on every front for a pulse-pounding white-knuckle experience.
It's Wait Until Dark (1967) meets The Strangers (2008). A deaf writer, Maddie (Kate Siegel), lives in isolation in the woods when a sadistic killer (John Gallagher Jr) targets her for a night of terror, violence, and death. Has it been done before? Of course, but only rarely this well. It's a technical masterpiece. I expected no less from the writer and director of Oculus, with its deceptive imagery and focus on the horrors of the visual world. Here, Mike Flanagan harnesses the power of sound (and, sometimes, the lack of sound) to entrap us in this cat-and-mouse game between an abled antagonist and a disabled protagonist. At first we might underestimate the effect of deafness on our hero, but when glass windows or doors start breaking, her phone starts ringing, or even when her only friend is murdered while pounding on her door for help, we realize that her particular situation is far from advantageous.
Flanagan and his team relentlessly pile on the horror and, with it, the smarts. While there are a few moments that will make any fan shout, "NO, don't do that, why would you do that," or "look behind you, look behind you, damnit!", there is no questioning the structure and technique of the film. Given that Maddie is deaf and mute, I was hoping that the film might be more silent than it was. But in retrospect, Flanagan does a fine job balancing the hushed moments with the banging, smashing, slicing crescendos. And the silence is never so silent that you are distracted by your own environment; he must have used ultrasound or some other tools to make the silence palpable. It's mesmerizing.
Fair warning for you faint of stomach, the finale becomes a bit of a bloodbath. One particular scene shows a hand getting stomped on repeatedly, and it comes to resemble a mangled, twisted mess of brokenness. It was hard for me to watch after that. I don't do broken bones, and this one was a beast.
It's an excellent scary movie, and it lives with you after viewing. Think on it: What do you do when you can't hear the things that go bump in the night?
IMDb: Hush
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