Hush (2016) - Review
Originally published February 2017Hush has been on my streaming services for a while. You may have noticed it yourself when scrolling through the horror category. There are a few things about the images associated with it that caught my attention and initially drew me to the film. However, the main thing that surprised me about Hush was the fact that I never wrote a review for it after I watched it last year. I somehow managed to forget to post anything on here after viewing it. Perhaps that says a lot about my overall opinion of the movie; I wouldn't call it great or awful. Still, I certainly think it's worth discussing further.
In some ways, Hush reminds me of a Hitchcock film by how it takes a simple premise and milks as much tension out of it as possible. If it is trying to match Hitchcock in skill and quality, it falls short. However, if it's just trying to be a captivating thriller about a deaf woman being stalked by a serial killer, while she cowers in her house, I think Hush does okay.
Image: Netflix
Pros
Serious tension throughout the film
The film's direction and editing really play off of the protagonist's perspective in an interesting way
Good acting from the small cast
Cons
Killer removes the mask early, making him far less intimidating or interesting
More could have happened in the house, instead of waiting so long for things to move inside
Protagonist is a little too helpless for most of the movie
Plot & Thoughts
Maddie (Kate Siegel) is a single woman and a successful author—she has to be successful because she's able to afford to live alone in her fancy Craftsman house in some secluded woods, somewhere in America. Maddie also happens to be deaf. The film opens with her attempting to cook dinner for herself with numerous close-up shots of the preparations and cooking. The close detail and focus on the sound of sizzling food on the pan are meant to play off your core senses. During this opening mosaic of different shots of food, the sound is removed. Moments like this help give the audience a better idea of her perspective, and it immediately gives those of us with our hearing a method of relating to her more.
Maddie is then briefly visited by her neighbor who has been reading her most recent book. During this brief bit of half-silent dialogue between the characters, we learn that Maddie wasn't always deaf and had to learn to adapt to her new life without one of her core senses. The neighbor leaves, Maddie starts cleaning up her mess, and then someone ends up dead on her doorstep.
Yeah, this movie gets going relatively quickly. It isn't very long at all before the serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) appears. Through some simple physical gestures, we can see that he quickly understands that Maddie is deaf. We can also tell from his behavior that he automatically assumes he has the upper hand. He toys with her deafness a little before making his presence known, at which point he leaves a taunting message for her: when she's broken from fear, he'll come inside the house to kill her.
Image: Netflix
The way Hush is shot and edited does a lot for the presentation because it constantly plays off the use of sound and its omission from the perspective of the protagonist. We get a lot of close-up shots of different pieces of the environment or visual cues of something that inspires a memory from a different sense like taste, touch, or smell. In the moments where a jump scare occurs, it makes the experience a little more tense because we sometimes have even more information than Maddie does.
The areas where Hush runs into trouble for me have to do with the characters and the relatively uneventful nature of the movie. I know that sounds like pretty much the entire movie, but keep in mind that this is somewhat nitpicky for what I think is a well-made film.
First, the killer. The killer removes his mask very early in the film; it's a creepy mask too. You might be saying, "Big deal. It's just a mask," but I think it was a wasted opportunity to make the guy seem more menacing for a little longer. As soon as we see his face, he's a human with the same mortal vulnerabilities as the rest of us—apparently, he's a mouth-breather, too. As soon as I saw his face, a lot of the tension I had washed out of me because he just seemed like a chump with a sadistic nature. I know the filmmakers wanted to use the fact that Maddie could read lips to have him convey his message to her, but there could have been ways around that without taking off the whole mask and showing us his face. If they had waited longer to remove his mask, like the middle of the movie to mark when Maddie was trying to conquer her fear, it would have been better. It would have been symbolic, at the very least. As a result, the killer had the potential to be interesting but ended up being a wasted opportunity.
Image: Netflix
The other area in which I think Hush falls short is the wasted potential of the house and the protagonist. The fact that Maddie was not born deaf and forced to adjust, and the fact that she became a successful individual despite her disability, implies that she's capable of adapting and overcoming challenges, which she does, eventually. She ends up being somewhat helpless for the majority of the film. It's not a harsh conflict of character, but it's still disappointing that she doesn't channel her inner Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm St until much later and only for a brief moment. I would have expected her to be thinking of different ways to fortify herself a lot sooner, considering how most of her house is a glass window. It's a big house to play with, too! Since she probably had some custom installations to it for herself besides just the fire alarm, it would have been interesting if the filmmakers portrayed her disability as more of a strength in her own environment. If they were going to try to Scream-ify the killer by making him vulnerable and weak, they could have done it more poetically by showing how he was at a disadvantage in her home, but it never quite ends up that way.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
While Hush doesn't quite achieve its full potential, I still think it's a well-made and entertaining film. The focus on sensory details helps keep us involved in the situation. The tension, while diminished by the fact that the killer seems like a tool once his mask is removed, is still constant and palpable to the end. If you want a decent thriller check out Hush. Then, watch Wait Until Dark with Catherine Hepburn to see what I mean about a movie that portrays a woman whose disability puts her at a unique advantage with a killer in her home, without losing the tension.
Image: Netflix
Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments!
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