Thriller Thursdays Hush - Silent Chiller

Intro: In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

The wonderful thing about Hush is how quickly it gets down to business. Maddie Young (Kate Siegel), a successful author struggling with the ending of a new book, is hearing and speech impaired, owing to meningitis which she contracted when she was 13. She shifts from New York to an isolated home in the woods and stays there with Bitch, her cat.

Her quiet life is soon turned upside down when a masked killer (John Gallagher Jr.) appears. The first warning comes when Maddie’s neighbour Sarah (Samantha Sloyan) appears all bloodied, banging away at her French window, asking for help. But, of course, Maddie cannot hear a thing, and Sarah is brutally stabbed to death.

Later, he turns his attention toward Maddie and he soon discovers Maddie’s disability. He proceeds to tease her, deciding to make her his next victim. He takes his mask off, so he can communicate with Maddie and discovers she can lip-read. From then on, the terror commences.

The thriller works at many levels. Firstly, because of her disability, Maddie cannot hear the killer break-in. Then, the mask, which is an undulating face with an ominous fixed smile, and the revealed face of the killer – calm, curious, enquiring and disarming. Finally, the tease – the phone messages, from Maddie’s phone to her own iPad, the tearing of her car tyres and the power being cut, thereby cutting all lines of outside communication.

It is interesting that Maddie came by her condition after experiencing normal hearing and speech, because it gives credence to the voice in her head, as it goes through possibilities and rejects them with reasoning. After the realisation of the danger surrounding her and the ruthlessness of her adversary, she sits down in the darkness to get her breath and wits back. She starts to think of how to make a fortress of her home. As the cat-and-mouse game continues, the desperation starts to tire and slowly starts converting into come-what-may daredevilry.

Maddie and the masked killer play against each other like chess pieces and are in sync with their respective fight for dominance and survival. A large part of the success of the film can be attributed to its ironic synchronicity which gives verisimilitude to the terror.

This film, with a runtime of an hour and twenty minutes, is woven beautifully with its superb sound design and its music (The Newton Brothers). Every sound, from the tapping of the laptop keys to the scratching on the glass, is heightened for effect and works beautifully as an aural shock. The music is tremulous but never over the top.

In a film in which only five living characters appear, with less than 15 minutes of dialogue and almost 70 minutes of speechless action, it was imperative to get the chemistry of the adversaries and the location right. Kate Siegel and director Mike Flanagan, who are a real-life couple, actually role-played each scene in their house before scripting it down. This helped them to better visualise how the characters would react in the face of life-threatening danger.

With its vulnerable protagonist, Hush immediately draws comparisons with the classic Wait Until Dark, where a blind Audrey Hepburn is terrorised by a bunch of thugs. Both stand well with each other, as thrillers that keep the viewer on the edge.

Trivia:

1. Shortly after Hush was released, Stephen King expressed his enthusiasm for the film on Twitter, saying "How good is Hush? Up there with Halloween and - even more - Wait Until Dark. White knuckle time."
2. Director Mike Flanagan and co-writer/star Kate Siegel are a married couple and conceived the storyline for Hush (2016) while on a dinner date in 2014. They wed in February 2016.
3. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 93% with an average rating of 7.6/10. The site’s critics' consensus reads, “Hush navigates the bloody waters of home invasion thrillers and incisive slashers for a contemporary horror puree.”

You can watch Hush here. 

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)