Mike Flanagan's Hush is a tense, twisted, no-nonsense type of horror movie which excels because of its understanding of the genre. A unique spin on the 'home invasion" sub-genre of Horror, Hush focuses on Maddie Young, an author who lives by herself in utter isolation by conventional standards, in a small home in a secluded area of the woods. Maddie is a character who lost her hearing as a teenager, and while Hush never directly states it, one gets the impression that this is the primary reason which Maggie now lives alone, away from her sister and parents. One night, Maggie's world of seclusion is horrifyingly shattered, when a psychotic masked killer appears at her doorstep, wanting nothing more than to watch Maggie suffer and die. Mike Flanagan's Hush is truly a cat and mouse type horror film, which finds a rather memorable psychopathic male underestimating his potential prey. Female empowerment is a major staple of the horror genre, and Hush is a film that embraces this ideal, providing a lean, breathless narrative about a woman in Maggie who is forced to fight for her life. Hush of course takes this theme one step further due to the fact that Maggie is both deaf and mute, creating a characterization of attributes which tend to be underestimated and viewed as weak in society. The filmmakers truly understood the uniqueness of a film like Hush, providing what I can only imagine is an accurate portrayal of suffering from complete hearing loss. With this, the sound design and screenplay become the best attributes of Hush, creating what feels like a very unique horror experience, regardless of how much the over-arching home invasion subgenre is played out. Mike Flanagan has always respected the horror audience and Hush is no different, never treating the audience like they are idiots or going overboard on exposition, letting its craft tell the story. For example, I like how the film never states it, but it is pretty obvious that our main antagonist is a serial killer of women, with the marks on the crossbow and the general exposition of his demeanor making it clear that he specifically like to targets the female gender. The fact that Maggie is deft just making him more aroused, for lack of a better word, as she is viewed as even more hopeless by the psychotic killer. In fact, in one scene towards the end of the film he even quips "I think you are holding out on me, I bet I can make you scream", a chilling sense of acknowledgement by the filmmakers to what really amounts to a major staple of the Horror/Slasher genre, a character who wants to destroy women. Mike Flanagan's Hush is a violent, breathless, engaging horror film experience that provides a nice twist on the rather tired subgenre of "home invasion".
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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