Hush Review (Film, 2016) The Archives
Hush is a home invasion horror film about a deaf novelist being tormented by a total stranger for no reason. I could also say that Hush is a modern home invasion horror film and be accurate enough.
All too often now, the home invasion subgenre is an excuse to just mindlessly torture and torment the victims with no real plot or purpose. Hush falls for that pitfall. The only thing that helps it to rise above the mindless slog of home invasion as torture trope is the depth of the lead character.
Screenwriter and star Katie Siegel, with her co-screenwriter and director Mike Flanagan, come very close to crafting a horror masterpiece just with their lead character Maddie. Maddie is an accomplished young novelist working on her second book. She lives alone in the woods, relying on technology–cellphones, laptops, specialty fire alarms–to be self-reliant. Her friends and family want her to either move back in with them or spend more time with them, but Maddie won’t have it. Maddie is deaf, but that is never used as an excuse or, worst of all, a substitute for actual character development.
Even more insidious and unforgivable than home invasion as torture film in modern horror is the use of a disability as a prop. Too often, filmmakers conflate disability with a total inability to do anything. It’s treated like a handicap in a sport—someone who requires a big leg up in an activity to even start at the same level as other players—rather than a medical handicap—an obstacle posed to daily life by a disability. They use the former kind of handicap as an excuse to remove a character’s agency and victimize them just for shock value.
Hush avoids this entirely. The main reason I am slightly underwhelmed by Hush is the early pivot to home invasion at the expense of exploring the rare disabled character in horror who is more than their physical or mental health. Maddie is a fascinating character. Her anxiety resulting from high expectations of her second novel is believable. Her relationships with her neighbor, her sister, and her ex-boyfriend help create this wonderful, intriguing universe for the story to take place in. All of it is abandoned to go into pure psychological torture in the all too typical style of the modern home invasion film.
John Gallagher Jr. is an imposing and terrifying figure in spite of the screenplay’s lack of detail. The action between The Man and Maddie is carefully plotted, but his motivations and character arc are ambiguous. Once the mask comes off, there’s little room for genuine intrigue.
Hush is scary. The gore is disturbing. The progression of the cat and mouse game has all the right beats. It just feels like a waste of potential.
I’m really struggling to think of another horror film where a deaf character is so well defined and believable. More commonly, a film will attempt to write around a character with a disability if they just plan on exploiting the disability for a scare or death later on in the film. Further, at this time in modern horror, you just didn’t find a deaf character who only communicates with sign language and does not use a hearing aid to make their dialogue and presence more accessible to a wide audience. We’re starting to see more deaf characters in the wake of A Quiet Place’s success, but only in very specific circumstances where the deafness is treated as a natural advantage against a terror. It’s…complicated.
Let’s take it one step further. Katie Siegel gives a fine performance in the film as a deaf character. However, she is not actually deaf. It’s incredibly rare for deaf performers to be cast in leading roles in films, even if the role is written as a deaf character. The common complaints about this practice includes lack of access to roles, inaccurate use of sign language (since the hearing actor is most likely choreographed on how to speak sign language), and unrealistic sign language (the cadence and emphasis of the language is off because the actor isn’t fluent in the language and using it in daily life).
The only deaf actor playing a role for a deaf person in horror I can think of is Millicent Simmonds in A Quiet Place. I remember writer/director John Krasinski had to fight to actually cast a deaf performer in the role. Simmonds, in turn, helped shape the film itself with insight and corrections into how a deaf person would act and communicate in the various scenes. The first big step to actually fixing this representation issue should be casting deaf actors, though the bar is so low that just having a deaf character with any agency in a film seems like a triumph.
Maddie is deaf. Nothing in the film changes this (and believe me, I was waiting for the horrible cliche of protagonist literally regaining her voice by triumphing over adversity, or managing to talk for the first and only time in a moment of pure primal instinct). Hush deserves credit for this alone. It’s not a difficult hurdle to get over, but so many horror films fail to let characters with disabilities actually be functioning people in the narrative.
I just wish we got to see more of this world that is so often ignored. Every narrative decision after the first 20 minutes is designed to remove Maddie’s agency as a self-sufficient protagonist; rather than destroy her, these challenges allow Maddie to opportunities to prove her resolve to live an independent life. If these beats were stretched out further, the film could be even more terrifying. We would have had time to adjust to the new restrictions placed upon Maddie and slowly realize that her opportunity for survival is withering away.
Instead, Hush abandons so much potential in favor of more familiar horror film beats. Once the invasion starts, we’re not given a minute just to breathe and exist with the character. The film is still scary and cohesive; it just could have been so much more.
***
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