Horror Film (2020) Review #6

Making its debut at the 2016 SXSW film festival, Hush is a home invasion movie ratchet up to horror suspense thriller. Working solely on the premise of the protagonist's particular disability, the film has you empathise with the character and her condition, which presents a situation relentlessly.  Written and Directed by Mike Flanigan, and co-written by Kate Siegel who also is the star the movie. Hush presents a series of very believable or plausible scenarios that can take place in a home within the real-time set up of the movie.  The writers who are also a real life couple, had rented a cabin one summer and ran through multiple practical scenarios in the course of the writing the script for the movie.  Flanigan is no stranger to Horror/Suspense with his breakthrough film being Oculus, a film promoted heavily by one of its producers the WWE back in 2013. Went into this film with a clear vision and structure of how to present this film.  Producer Jason Blum of Blumhouse productions, signed on as the producer as it falls into their working model, and shopped the film to Netflix for its worldwide distribution deal.
The Premise   Maddie is a writer, who has retreated to the woods to live a solitary life to focus on her next novel.  While she is deaf and mute, her only neighbour Sarah gets killed trying to flee a murderer, which unintentionally brings the masked killer to her window.  This begins a game of cat and mouse as the murderer begins to understand his next victim a little better.

Winner of a iHorror award and Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award; Hush is 82 minutes of sheer thrill,  a perfect amount of time to tell a complete story with virtually no dialogue. It keenly sets up visually cues and follows though with its set up in surprising and unsettling ways.  The film works from the perspective of Maddie on how she copes and navigates her way in this new found situation,  As a viewer, I felt I was put in a lock box with a peep hole view of the outside world trying to figure out how to get free.  The film remains intimate and isolated the key ingredients to tell a story of home invasion in the best way possible. The film does hit a third act and increases the stakes with gore as the outside world breaks in and we reach the climatic conclusion.
For a younger audience the film will bring comparisons to movies like 'The Strangers', and 'Don't Breathe' as it shares many like minded tones.  As for more historical context, the movie was inspired by Audrey Hepburn's 1967 film 'Wait until Dark', in which the director and his co-writer did acknowledge as one of the source materials of developing this film.