Review of Hush (2016) by K Nife C — 19 Nov 2016

Preceding this year's similarly themed "Don't Breathe" and director Mike Flanagan's more recent release "Ouija: Origin of Evil", "Hush" shares many commonalities with these films and the other home invasion horror flicks of recent.

This one manages to deliver maximum tension due to its lack of dialogue (the protagonist is deaf/mute), simple plot (a killer traps her in a house), and attention to realistic mechanisms of survival. It does what those many other horror films were trying to do but better.

The film stars Flanagan's wife, Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the film and who plays a writer that states she envisions seven endings to every story, and you could make a case that everything that unfolds after she sits down to start writing her new book is just her imagination playing out this tentative story.

Antagonists like Hannibal Lecter make your skin crawl not just by their horrible deeds but by the deeper implications of their actions. That they understand the trappings of basic human empathy and choose to reject them to such a degree of sadism is more disturbing than any single act of violence.

The fact that the killer has no name also adds a layer of pervasive unknown fear. He is both real and unreal, and perhaps a figment of the protagonist's imagination. It is what is left unsaid that makes the killer more compelling and the protagonist all that more ingenious.

I could just be reading too much into it. Regardless, I'm certain they wanted to make a tense home invasion thriller, and Flanagan and Siegel certainly created one of the simplest and best this year.