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Hush
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Mike Flanagan is a talented and prolific new
filmmaker, who has managed to make six features within six years, all within
the horror-thriller genre ambit; his forthcoming projects are a TV series based
on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill
House (2018), and Doctor Sleep,
an adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The
Shining (!).
Hush is the least usual project in
Flanagan’s CV so far. Described as a “secret” production, its existence as a
completed work was unveiled in late 2015; it appeared on cinema screens and
Netflix in 2016. It is the fruit of a close collaboration between Flanagan and
his wife, Kate Siegel, who both stars (doing a great job) and co-wrote the
script. Tales from the shoot speak of how the duo plotted out all the moves of
the film according to the geography of their own home, and employed a good deal
of improvisation in the eventual filming (on a location that was not their
home). There is, however, nothing shaky in the finished result: it’s
beautifully calculated and controlled at all levels. (William Friedkin professes to be a fan of it, too, which doesn’t
surprise me.)
Where other Flanagan films (such as Before I Wake [2016, shot 2013] and Gerald’s Game [2017]) are well-directed
stews of dubious ideas either closely adapted from or clearly inspired by
Stephen King’s therapeutic horror-fantasies, Hush is a cut above that level. Ingeniously orchestrated, it avoids
virtually every cheap, tiresome shock effect done to death by contemporary
horror films. Even the evident plot “hooks” planted at the start, by the time
they inevitably come into play by Act 3, are satisfyingly delivered.
Most of the action occurs within one, large, country
house. Maddie (Siegel) is a successful writer who
lost both her hearing and her voice at age 13. She has a good friend, Sarah
(Samantha Sloyan), close by next door; she
communicates via sign language with friends and family on laptop Skype and
mobile phone. We are treated, early on, not only to crucial, physical details
about phones-in-pockets and whatnot; but also an elaborate discourse (very
familiar to a writer like myself!) on how Maddie is
psychically tormented by the “multiple endings” she naturally envisages for all
her plots in progress, and her terrible difficulty in deciding on the best one.
A local serial killer, credited only as Man (John
Gallagher, Jr), comes calling. He doesn’t manage to get inside Maddie’s house straight away, but he’s determined to wait around, bide his time and
check out the various entrance options until he can make his decisive move.
Various somewhat successful manoeuvres on Maddie’s part against him only increase his anger, caginess and persistence.
Although Man begins his campaign in a Halloween-style mask, that accessory
comes off pretty quickly to reveal (as Stephanie Van Schilt has pointed out) … just another, ordinary, harassive-abusive
guy, nobody who looks especially monstrous or evil. The film doesn’t even
bother to give him some cooked-up backstory to explain a spurious
psychopathology. He’s just a really bad, violent, everyday dude – giving Hush a chilling resonance when viewed in
late 2017.
The film remains superbly grounded when it comes to
depicting all the movements (of both characters) in and around the house. For a
horror-thriller, it keeps to a surprisingly realistic system of speeds, eyelines and plausible options. There is very little here
of the typically “magical” appearances and disappearances of the villain
suddenly bursting into the foreground of a frame, or seemingly penetrating
solid walls and locked doors as if a phantom. (Of course, that can be done
well, too, as in Fred Walton’s
films.) The one time that Hush breaks this rule, it conserves the move for a late stage of
the story – and, even then, effectively restrains itself by keeping to the
apparition of a blurred shape in the background of a normal, static shot.
Restraint is, indeed, the watchword of this film. For
once, the musical score for a horror piece (by the Newton Brothers, also
regular collaborators with Flanagan) does not ramp up every chill, fright and
dramatic crescendo with a steep-rise-then-sudden-death cacophony.
Apparently, Flanagan and Siegel toyed, at first, with
the idea of making a wholly “silent” film – whatever that may have meant to
them at the time (no soundtrack at all? I doubt it). They took another path,
and I am very happy that they did: alternating between the “real” sound of the
external world (well reconstructed and designed), and Maddie’s internal world of silence (also sonically stylised). This meshes with a visual mise en scène schema typical of many fine
thrillers in the Hitchcock/De Palma/Polanski tradition: we are often given to see what Maddie does not turn to see, because she cannot hear it.
Many thrillers in the lineage of Wait Until Dark (1967), Blink (1994) or the TV series Hannibal have
played on characters’ “sense deprivation” (mainly of sight or hearing) as an
enabling cinematic device, even at the risk of gratuitous sadism (on the
filmmakers’ part) and galloping implausibility; Hush joins the top tier rank of winning examples.
Eventually, the story winds back to those multiple
endings that play in Maddie’s mind. As if this ordeal
has become one of her own fictions (it’s a light meta-twist), she imagines each
option, and plays them out one by one – the film, of course, picturing each for
us in lightning succession. It’s possible that absolutely none of these
scenarios will end well for her – but only one of them, ultimately, is even
worth trying in the flesh. See how she fares with it in Hush.
© Adrian Martin 12 January 2018 |
