‘Hush’ (2016)

Many of the elements of “Hush” are immediately familiar to us: A woman is alone in a remote cottage when a masked killer arrives and begins stalking her from outside, all the while harboring the threat of a home invasion that could (and in most movies, would) prove fatal to the home’s sole inhabitant.

But fortunately, “Hush” is not most movies. Although it does play around with the kinds of horror movie tropes that we’ve seen again and again in endless franchises of “slasher” flicks and home invasion thrillers, married writing duo Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel’s screenplay fires a lightning bolt up the spine of the genre by introducing one of the most magnetic and sincerely developed heroines in horror history.

Her name is Maddie (Kate Siegel) and she an established author who is also completely deaf. Seeds are planted in the opening scenes that quickly grow into our realization of how ingeniously “Hush” is going to weave her disability into both the story and style of the film.

As Maddie cooks dinner, for instance, the sound design with its potent pops and crackles lends us a rich, textural experience that Maddie herself cannot hear but perhaps can still enjoy on a different level entirely—what we are able to hear, she is able to feel.

The same goes for her sign-language conversations with her friend and neighbor Sarah (Samantha Sloyan), as Maddie communicates to Sarah her secret to writing herself out of tough corners in her novels—she describes how she hears a voice in her head, one that sounds like her mother’s comforting voice, warning her of dead-ends in story and guiding her toward effective solutions. It is in these scenes that we get to know Maddie and enjoy her company.

This is an important factor in the horror and suspense to come, and it highlights how so many movies like this fail because they aren’t interested in making us care about the characters on the screen. Once they fail to gain our trust and empathy, and fail to truly inhabit their own world, the suspense evaporates pretty quickly. Siegel, who also co-wrote “Hush,” more than inhabits this world, as she creates a completely sincere and convincing character on screen.

It is while Maddie is washing dishes after dinner when the masked killer (John Gallagher Jr.) shows up and taps on the sliding glass door, only to realize that the girl alone in her house with her back turned to him cannot hear the tap-tap-tap of his fingers on the glass. He immediately realizes that her disability can be used to his advantage.

What he doesn’t realize is just how strong and resourceful Maddie herself is, and how determined she is to survive the night.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse game of the highest order, slickly directed by Flanagan whose 2013 supernatural film “Oculus” wove in many of the same brilliant story, style and genre techniques. With both “Hush” and “Oculus,” shades of Stephen King and Rod Serling allow for a comforting familiarity, while Flanagan keeps things taut, trim and entertaining. At a swift 80 minutes, “Hush” gets in and gets out without losing an ounce of steam—there’s no room nonsense in a film like this that soars on its simplicity and dares to think outside of the genre box.

★★★½ (out of 4)

 

Beasts of No Nation (2015)

There is a tremendous sense of clarity and confidence built into Cary Fukunaga’s “Beasts of No Nation.” He has shown these qualities on each of his previous projects, which include the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s “True Detective” on HBO, which he directed, and in his adaptation — and, I think, the finest adaptation yet — of Charlotte Bronte’s gothic novel, “Jane Eyre,” which he wrote and directed.

Here, with “Beasts of No Nation,” Fukunaga directs and once again adapts his screenplay from a novel by Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala. The film follows Agu (Abraham Attah), a young boy whose family is torn apart in a civil war taking place in an African country that is never given a name.

Following the massacre of his village, Agu is found wandering in the deep African jungle and recruited as a child soldier by the rebel Native Defense Force led by a man they call Commandant (Idris Elba). Commandant is a tall, shrewd man, intimidating and manipulative, able to play on the fear, confusion and unchecked fury of the children he recruits.

Agu is no different, and is forced to commit unspeakable, gruesome acts, partially as ritual and initiation, partially as sport, partially as supposed acts of political insurgence. He also is abused by the Commandant, and through the abuse acted upon him and the acts of violence Agu is made to enact on others, we witness a nerve-wracking and at times challenging-to-watch spiral into the darkest depths of humankind.

Perhaps the most interesting observation I can make about this extraordinary film is how poetically the story is told. Fukunaga served as cinematographer on this film, as well as writer and director, and his visual style and fluid approach to storytelling calls to mind the transcendental work of filmmakers David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “Joe”), Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter,” “Mud”), and Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line,” “The New World”).

Fukunaga also has a way of taking more “showy” shots and blending them into the story without distracting us from it. There is one particularly amazing sequence that shows the fractured passing of time, and is communicates both Agu’s moral deterioration, and his lost perception of time and place, as the violence becomes such a frequent part of his everyday life that it actually begins to lose its impact on him.

There is another extended sequence, more chilling and technically impressive than perhaps any other in the film, where we see the storming of a building by the rebel army. This shot rivals even Fukunaga’s harrowing 6-minute-long take in “True Detective,” and builds to a blood curdling climax where we witness a brief resurgence in Agu’s humanity, even as it is juxtaposed with more violent behavior.

“Beasts of No Nation” is an incredible achievement on both a technical level and on a narrative level. For the latter, we can also thank the stripped-down, powerful performances. Most notable among these are those of Attah and Elba, who carry us through this labyrinth of horrors with grace and stark sincerity. Attah, who makes his acting debut here, is capable of communicating so much with a subtle change of expression, and gradually shows with this performance that his skill ranges on a spectrum far beyond his years.

I mentioned earlier that the setting of the film is an unnamed African country. This is an important detail, as the anonymity of where we are actually works to enhance the urgency of the story as not a preachy, political sermon, but as a more raw, more direct journey into a boy’s loss of innocence as he is abandoned, and then found again in a war-torn land. This is a human story, and who better than Fukunaga to guide us through the dark and find humanity among the shadows.

With a powerful, ethereal score by Dan Romer, graceful writing, direction and cinematography by Fukunaga, and restrained, sincere performances all around, “Beasts of No Nation” is one of the best films of 2015 and Fukunaga’s finest work yet.

★★★★ (out of 4)