‘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)