Hush (2016)

Director: Mike Flanagan
Writer(s): Flanagan and Kate Siegel
Starring: Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr., Michael Trucco, and Samantha Sloyan

Hush proves that no matter what disability you give your main character, a shitty home invasion movie is still a shitty home invasion movie.  It also proves just how easy it is to trick critics into thinking you’ve made something special: throw in a heroine that doesn’t lay down and play submissive at the first sign of trouble, and watch them all rush to crown your work the next horror masterpiece.  Just excuse the fact that she’s one of the stupidest characters to grace a horror film in a long time; her only saving grace is that the man who randomly decides he wants to kill her is somehow even stupider.  Also, ignore that the story is nothing but standard genre fare…in other words, take the idea of a tough, deaf woman out of the picture, and what you’re left with is a terrible, lazy excuse for a film that no one would have even batted a lash at.

Kate Siegel (also one of the co-writers) plays Maddie Young, a deaf writer who logically lives all by herself in a secluded cottage buried deep in the woods.  Without a gun or any manner of weaponry for self-defense.  Now, I understand that real-life writers often quarantine themselves away from others when writing, but isn’t that usually to get a little peace and quiet?  At the expense of sounding rude, isn’t that all that Maddie hears to begin with?  All half-joking aside, it’s kind of an idiotic set-up already, as her friends constantly worry about her and her safety, but hey, it’s a horror movie!  Let’s just bare with it…

Hush begins by quickly establishing her lifestyle: she talks on the phone to a couple friends (via videophone and sign language), ignores a call from her ex-boyfriend Craig, decides to FaceTime Craig but backs down at the last second, then ignores him again when he calls back, FaceTime’s her sister, and in between all this, sits herself down to write her next novel.  Also, to spoon-feed us every little tidbit of information that we might possibly need to understand this complex plot, her friend, Sarah, from a nearby house that always remains unseen, stops by to give Maddie a glowing review of her first novel, and to return her copy of it.  They spend a couple hours chatting on her front porch, conveniently taking us from daylight to dusk, before Sarah heads home.  Only, she never makes it.

While Maddie is in the kitchen, preparing dinner, Sarah runs up to her side door, which is conveniently all glass.  She screams, begging for help, furiously pounding on the glass door before a masked killer comes up and finishes her off.  This is concerning because it also shows us another sense that Maddie apparently lacks, and that’s peripheral vision: even though this whole attack lasts over a minute, literally FEET away from her, and even though she spends a good amount of this time facing forward, at an angle where the furious flash of colors and motion would have captured the attention of even a blind person, she goes about obliviously continuing to go about her task.  Hold on, it gets worse.

The killer, who by now has already figured out that she cannot hear, opens her front door and stands mere feet away from behind her as she tries writing her novel on the couch.  It’s chilly out, something we know because not five minutes of screen time later, she opens the very same front door and shudders.  Yet she can’t feel the draft of the open door as she cluelessly types away, nor can she feel the presence of an intruder staring at her while brandishing a knife?  She is finally clued in that something is amiss a little later, when her previously-missing phone turns up with photos of her sitting in the house, including one snapped mere seconds earlier.  Now she realizes that something is wrong; the man soon appears on her front porch brandishing a crossbow, and one of the most asinine “hunter” vs. “hunted” films ever made is underway.

Actually, it doesn’t feel so much a game of cat-and-mouse as it does a case of writers trying to pad a twenty-minute movie into a space four times greater than that.  There are countless shots of the killer walking around her house, trying to see her through the windows, to taunt her some more.  Only, these pack no suspense whatsoever, because he clearly states at the beginning that he won’t come in there until she wants to die.  Now, this could have been a nice little lie that could have lead to some suspense, if all of a sudden she looked and the door was open and he was somewhere inside, but it's pretty obvious from the way he keeps pacing around outside that he's that one rare killer who's a man of his word.  Since there’s no direct threat of him entering the house, which seems to be made up of 90% windows, then that pretty much removes a very large dose of tension.

Maddie also happens to be completely oblivious to common sense: if you are deaf and under attack, I would think logic would dictate that you stay in a room with as few windows, and ways to gain entrance, as possible.  So her first thought is to stay on the first floor, in a bedroom with two windows, and sit between the two windows facing the bedroom door.  Gee, I don’t know how that could go wrong.  In no time at all she’s lured out by the killer using her dead friend to knock on the window, something she doesn’t have to acknowledge or answer, but of course does.  It’s literally not until about half-hour into the confrontation that Maddie seems to even remember that she has an upstairs flat; there’s only one way in from the inside (walking up the steps) and the only way in from the killer’s perspective would require him to climb up to the roof and break a window.  But instead of wisely arming herself with a sharp object and guarding the two entrances, she makes another genius decision: climb out the upstairs window herself, and walk around on the roof, where one misstep would clearly cost her her life.  She tries creating a diversion by throwing her flashlight into the woods.  The killer hears the flashlight land, sees it shining on the ground, obviously not being manned by anyone, and clearly having been thrown there by someone desperately trying to escape, and still goes to check it out.  Jesus, it’s like Dumb & Dumber in horror form.

In another case of blind stupidity, the killer sees Maddie on the roof, climbs up to get her, and somehow doesn’t even brace for the possibility that she’s waiting to attack him when he reaches the top rung.  Because, you know, people on ladders aren’t vulnerable in the least.  So it completely catches him off guard when she hits him in the face with a blunt object, sending him falling to the ground below.  Come on there, menacing killer, that’s some Home Alone shit right there, and probably the first thing you should plan for when climbing up anything to confront someone desperate for survival.

What attracted me to this was the assurance that it tramples over well-worn home-invasion stereotypes; it doesn’t even have the intelligence (or gall) to do that.  There are brief snippets where the sound cuts out for a few seconds—obviously so that we can hear what she hears—but it’s only a few times during the whole movie, and only once during the “attack”.  How hard would it have been to show some scenes from her POV, complete with the sound removed?  That wouldn’t have added anything to the budget, and would have instantly established a claustrophobic atmosphere, while giving us a specific example of just how detrimental her lack of hearing is, and how much more difficult it makes her situation.  Truthfully, there were any number of ways that the filmmakers could have really toyed with either her handicap, or the whole tired home-invasion idea, but they seem dedicated to following the path well-traveled, delivering a film that has the appearance of wanting to try something new, without actually doing it.

I'm not even going to get myself started on the ending, which is so laughably atrocious that it defies all logic.  I really can't mention anything without giving it away, but the difficulties a fully-grown, relatively healthy, and mentally capable adult male has in dispatching a weak female who is slowly bleeding to death, is truly mind-boggling.  If I'm coming off as misogynistic, I'm really not meaning to be: I literally mean the woman is so bad-off that just looking at her wrong could kill her, and yet this injured-yet-able-bodied adult male, with the full ability to move and carry things, basically has to go out of his way to give her a fighting chance, and does so, to infuriating results.

To try to end this on a somewhat positive note, it's competently made, and the acting is okay.  I mean, as with a lot of such films, "acting" boils down to simply crying for long stretches (the victim), and taunting said crying girl (the killer), but both leads are at least adept at sticking to their established roles.  And hey, in a movie this bad, even something mediocre is a resounding win!

If you like your horror movies to be slow, predictable slogs through genre conventions, then set aside some time for Hush.  If you want something more than that, I can only apologize on its behalf.

RECAP: Hush is nothing more than overhyped trash; the cat-and-mouse game that comprises most of the narrative is a wash thanks to the stupidity of the two main characters, who frequently make such ignorant decisions, you would swear they were suicidal.  This basically plays out like a twenty-minute short blown up to four times that size; it feels like it was padded with endless shots of the killer walking around the house, and constantly looking into windows.  Don't be surprised if, by the end, you're torn between who you think deserves to die more: the killer, because he blows trillions of chances to finish off his victim, or the deaf woman, because her death would serve as the immediate end to the movie, and thus, your suffering.

RATING: 2/10    

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