[Review] Hush

Over the past few years, some of the best horror has arrived by way of VOD: Grand Piano, We Are Still Here, Creep, Southbound, The Invitation, and even the excellent The Babadook initially appeared on the platform. Now, Mike Flanagan (director of the surprisingly effective Oculus) adds Hush to the club.

Amidst the cold and hazy opening, we take a voyeuristic trek to a secluded house in the woods. A young author named Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) lives here. Apparently, she lost her hearing at the age of 13, and has chosen a life of isolation, aside from her online presence. Things don't take long at all to get crazy when a masked serial killer shows up at night on her front porch.

Of course the dread levels are way up, especially because we're given an omniscient view. Some of the early scares take place behind Maddie's back, and it's enough to make you want to yank your hair out. And once she does catch wind of what's going on, a tense and jumpy cat & mouse game ensues. But much like Michelle from this year's 10 Cloverfield Lane, Maddie is no pushover. She performs a swell amount of craft and quick-thinking of her own to combat the psycho, making the story more of a brooding and potentially bloody high-stakes chess match than a helpless hide-and-seek screamfest.

The film actually loses a bit of its punch during the midsection of the brief 80-minute duration, but don't get it twisted, Hush is still a mostly uneasy and frightening experience. Flanagan creates a dark ambience and once again proves to have the technical chops to produce a solid horror flick. There's a lot of jarring shifts between silence and alarms. And it's really the quiet moments that make the heart race: A twist of a door handle, a sudden power outage, a nervous peek out the window.

7.5/10