A hidden entertainment on Netflix is the 2016 horror movie “Hush: Death Hears”, by one of the most interesting directors of the 21st century, Mike Flanagan. In the same year, Flanagan released his best feature, "O Sono da Morte" and another entertainment, "Ouija - Origin of Evil". In 2019, he made the celebrated “Doctor Sleep”, a kind of risky continuation of Kubrick's classic, “The Shining” (1980).
In the plot of “Hush”, Maddie (Kate Siegel, also a co-writer), is a deaf and mute writer who isolates herself in the countryside to write her successful novels. Sometimes she receives a friend who also lives in the countryside. The rest of her social life takes place through virtual unication apps.
On a dark night, the only thing that can happen in the countryside, your neighbor is murdered by a masked man, not even on her doorstep. But she doesn't hear the victim's desperate screams. She doesn't even notice the presence of the killer, who even enters her house, but is initially more prone to horror games.
For example: already in the first twenty minutes the mysterious killer takes off his mask, revealing his face, the face of a man. This is the face of American violence on many occasions: that of an ordinary man, who pretends to be polite, but collects skeletons in his closet.
Maddie, deaf and mute, could never live in isolation. But she is a writer, we can believe in the idea of the reclusive artist, who takes refuge in the middle of nature to better create her stories. It's a cliché, which we gladly accept if the narrative goes well, but which will count negative points if many mistakes accumulate.
Two films from another era, other ambitions, come to mind. The first is superior: “Blind Terror” (1971), by Richard Fleischer, in which Mia Farrow is a blind young woman threatened by a maniac in her country house. The second is inferior, but bears greater similarities to “Hush”. It is “A Flash in the Dark” (1967), by Terence Young, in which Audrey Hepburn is a girl who has recently lost her sight, and is terrorized by three men looking for heroin hidden in a doll.
In all three films, and, to a certain extent, in many others, to a greater or lesser extent, the heroine has some difficulty that diminishes her chances of survival. She will then have to learn to fight her weapons, her other senses, heightened by the absence of one or two of them, and the surprise factor.
Short film, just over eighty minutes long, taken and written with the usual skill by Flanagan, “Hush” is yet another exercise in suspense and horror that does justice to the genre without giving us anything truly new. Even the style seems more adapted in relation to the director's other films, as if he were more interested in the horror itself, of the writer around a deranged person.
In fact, the biggest challenge is to sustain these eighty minutes, since the whole situation is already twenty, leaving then an hour for a confrontation that would tend to be resolved quickly. That's where Flanagan makes the difference, where several directors could offer themselves to deception. There are, of course, a few more clichés. There is, however, a real interest in the unfolding of the story and in a perhaps improbable outcome, after some unnecessary detours along the way (Maddie's internal voice, for example).
* Sérgio Alpendre is a film critic and professor
