Hush (2016 film)

Plot

Madison "Maddie" Young (Kate Siegel), a young deaf author who lost her hearing after a bout of bacterial meningitis at age 13, lives in an isolated house in the woods. Her friend and neighbor Sarah (Samantha Sloyan) visits her one day to return a copy of her book, and that night, is chased back to Maddie's house by a masked man (John Gallagher Jr.). Sarah bangs on the door for help, but Maddie can't hear her, and the man stabs her to death.

The man quickly realizes that Maddie is deaf and decides to make her another victim. He sneaks into the house, takes her phone, and begins taking photos of her and sending them to her laptop to make her aware of his presence. As Maddie realizes she's being stalked, she locks herself inside the house. The man cuts the power and sabotages her car. Maddie writes that she "won't tell, didn't see [his] face, boyfriend coming home" on the glass-paneled front door in lipstick. The man responds by taking off his mask and saying that she has seen his face now. He then taunts her by propping Sarah's body up against her bedroom window. Maddie tries to distract him with her car alarm so she can get Sarah's phone from her body, but fails to get it before he returns.

She then makes several failed attempts to escape, eventually climbing onto the roof. The man fires a crossbow bolt into her leg, but she manages to knock him off the roof and steal his crossbow. She staggers back into the house and tries to load the crossbow as Sarah's boyfriend John (Michael Trucco) arrives, looking for Sarah. The man meets John, pretending that he is a police officer, but John realizes the trick and attempts to attack the man from behind with a rock. Before he can, Maddie bangs on her door to get his attention, distracting him and enabling the man to stab him in the neck.

As he bleeds out, John uses his remaining strength to put the man in a chokehold to give Maddie time to escape, but she realizes she can't run on her injured leg and that she's also in danger of bleeding out. Maddie begins thinking through her options but realizes she can't escape nor hide: her only hope for survival is killing the man. John dies and the man begins to threaten Maddie's cat. She shoots him with the crossbow but only hits his shoulder. While running back inside, her hand gets caught in the front door and the man stomps on it and crushes it. He threatens to enter, and she taunts him by writing "do it, coward" on the door with her blood. As he prepares to, Maddie quickly types her last words to her family and adds a description of the man on her laptop, then runs to the bathroom with a knife and waits for the man to open the door.

The man instead climbs in behind her from a skylight and prepares to stab her but she feels his breath on her neck and stabs him in the leg just in time. She stumbles to the kitchen, where she uses insecticide spray and her specialized smoke alarm to blind and deafen him, but he regains the upper hand by strangling her. On the verge of losing consciousness, she manages to grab a nearby corkscrew and stab the man in the throat, finally killing him.

After taking her cell phone back from the man's corpse, Maddie calls 911, and stumbles outside. She pets her cat as the police arrive at the house, and the film ends with Maddie smiling at the camera.

Cast

Production

Nothing was known about the project until September 2015, when it was revealed at a buyers' screening which occurred at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. It was revealed Mike Flanagan had directed and written the film, opposite Kate Siegel who also stars in the film.

On making the main character a deaf mute, Flanagan had said it originated from him wanting to do a movie "without dialogue". The possibility of making the film entirely silent was briefly considered, but was soon abandoned when it was realized that building tension with this limitation would be "impossible" Flanagan also noted that the target audience would not have been used to silent films and, as such, would "seek out every kind of audio stimulus anywhere else in the environment" or simply choose to not watch the film at all.

The script itself consisted largely of scene directions, which Flanagan and Siegel developed by acting out in their own house. The fact that so much of the script was based around Flanagan and Siegel's own house proved problematic for filming, as when they went to shoot the film in Alabama, they could not find a house similar enough to theirs and had to significantly alter the film's script. Flanagan also found challenges in the single location and had to plan the cinematography to keep the film interesting to the audience, especially given the mute nature of the protagonist; to this end, Flanagan used a Steadicam to follow Siegel's every move, along with a boom mic and a spotter, to make the movement more "dynamic". The resulting audio for these scenes could not be used and had to be redone in post, with Flanagan noting that the audio initially "sounded like a herd of elephants."

To represent Maddie's world, various ambient sounds were used, such as the sound of ultrasound machines. Flanagan did not want to use pure silence for these scenes, as he still felt it would make viewers hyper aware of their surrounding and take them out of the experience. As a result of the aforementioned camera set in, Siegel had to ADR her own breath into the final film. The film's soundtrack was composed by The Newton Brothers.

Release

The film had its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 12, 2016. Prior to the premiere, Netflix acquired worldwide distribution rights to the film, with a planned April 8, 2016, release.

Reception

Hush holds a 94% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 16 reviews and has an average rating of 7.8/10. On Metacritic, the film has a score of 67 out of 100 based on 7 critics indicating "generally favorable reviews." Audiences Everywhere called the film "a modern slasher movie classic that's not to be missed." Benjamin Lee of The Guardian said that Hush "offers ingenious suspense" and awarded it four out of five stars. Variety, though criticizing the film's third act, called it "one of the more inspired concoctions to emerge from the busy Blumhouse horror-thriller assembly line in recent years." Michael Gingold of Fangoria gave the film 3.5/4 stars, calling it "a good old-fashioned truly scary movie". Jasef Wisener of TVOvermind gave the film a 4.7/5, noting that "Thanks to the performances from its two leads, Hush succeeds in almost every aspect and delivers one of the best horror films in modern history."

Stephen King tweeted about the film on April 20, 2016, saying, "How good is Hush? Up there with Halloween and, even more, Wait Until Dark. White knuckle time. On Netflix." Filmmaker William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, also tweeted about the film, saying "HUSH is a great horror film...on Netflix. Terrifying."