Hush directed by Mike Flanagan. Image courtesy of Blumhouse Productions.
2016’s Hush is a film directed by Mike Flanagan. Flanagan has steadily built up a career by making solid, medium-scale horror content for Netflix and being married to Kate Siegel (who, as in most of his films, stars in Hush). It’s an interesting career arc because he spent the last few years developing technical, stylistic and story-telling skills and you can pretty clearly trace that progression from Oculus to Before I Wake to Hush, all of which were building toward the much larger, more ambitious and absolutely stellar (minus the last episode) Netflix version of the Haunting of Hill House.
Hush is an extremely stripped down bare-bones film: a deaf women in an isolated cabin is terrorized by a random stranger. She fights back. The end. As a self-contained feature, it is a bit hard to sustain such a premise for the full run time of a film. But as a technical exercise in staging set pieces, I thought the film was pretty good. It reminds me of Annabelle Comes Home, which was basically just a sandbox for Gary Dauberman to test out his directing chops on a series of set pieces in a relatively low-stakes way.
In isolation, this would be a minor and forgettable thing. But because Hush was an important building block in a grander vision - Flanagan is now developing Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw for Netflix, which I for one am geeked about - I think it’s an interesting display of how a director gets his feet under him by playing around creating suspenseful set pieces in a fairly stripped down film like Hush, before graduating to bigger and better things. I think it’s also a good lesson in the importance of methodical hard work and not rushing your career, stepping into the franchise shoes when you’re ready and not before.
Common sense, right? But it’s a lesson Warner Bros learned too late.
