I am reviewing the movie Hush. Hush is a horror/ thriller movie about a young author named Maddie who is deaf-mute and lives in a secluded woodsy area. Maddie’s nearby neighbors, Sarah comes running to Maddie’s door to avoid a killer, but she couldn’t hear her due to her disability. The psychotic killer realizes she is hard of hearing and decides to go after her. He steals her phone and proceeds to taking pictures of her around her house and sending them to her through her laptop. Freaking her out she looks around and notices her door is open and runs up to it and closes it. The killer stares at her from the other side of the glass door in a taunting way. The killer cuts out her power and internet connection, making it difficult to get help and see in the dark. He plays a cat-and-mouse game with Maddie, tormenting and taunting her. As she continues to fight to stay alive, Sarah’s boyfriend, John, comes looking for Sarah and he finds the killer lurking around outside and realizes something is fishy. When John tried to attack the killer, Maddie bangs on the window calling for his attention, which momentarily distracts John, allowing the killer to stab him in the neck. While bleeding out John puts the killer in a choke hold but dies, loosening his grip and keeping the killer alive. Towards the end of the movie, Maddie had temporarily blinded and deafened the killer but he was able to regain enough strength to strangle her. Has she begun to lose consciousness, she was able to grab a corkscrew and stab him in the throat, finally killing him. Maddie takes her cell phone back from the now dead killer and calls 911.
The silence is golden. This movie is very impressive with its use of taking disadvantages and turning them into strengths. The writers do a great job at building a sense horror by eliminating parts of Maddie’s senses, such as; hearing, making it dark and harder to see clearly, and having the killer break one of her hands. The writers turned Maddie into a lionhearted character by having her go through all those obstacles and then having her come out even stronger. Since Maddie is deaf, the audience sympathizes towards her and feels worried about if she’ll make it out of there or not. The audience is also able to connect with Maddie by feeling trapped as she is inside a dark house where there is a limit on space and movement. Towards the end of the movie the writers used dramatic irony by having Maddie stab the killer in the leg, like how he shot her with an arrow in the leg, she blinds him with a can of spray, and deafens him with the very loud fire alarm, making the killer experience what she went through. Something that I want to point out that was a good call by the directors was the heightened sounds in the beginning of the movie of everyday normal sounds, such as Maddie chopping onions, the sizzling the asparagus and her cracking an egg in the beginning of the movie and during the outdoor scenes the nature sounds were louder as well. This increases the sense of sounds that lack from the main character. I feel that if the writers made more of the movie silent it would’ve been more scary since we would almost feel the way Maddie felt the whole time. I would give this movie 4.5 out of 5 stars. It was a very good movie, but I feel like if the writers had the killer taunt her a little more to build the suspense, it would’ve thrown it all together.
