Hush ***

This thrilling home-invasion horror stars Kate Siegel as Maddie, a deaf writer living in an isolated woodland cottage. It’s evening – she is attempting to finish the ending to her novel while interacting with her friends online and avoiding calls from her ex-boyfriend – but she is tormented by a masked intruder who lurks outside armed with a crossbow and knives. Now trapped inside her home, Maddie has to outsmart her pursuer in order to survive. 

Mike Flanagan –whose previous credits include Oculus and Absentia – directs with a mean efficiency, evoking a genuinely chilling atmosphere and building an authentic sense of tension. The balance between suspense and violence is effectively orchestrated and disciplined – it is nasty when it needs to be – but the drama also plays out as a psychological battle of wits where Maddie, in facing her intruder, has to figure out how to overcome her physical impediments while using them to her unique advantage.

As stripped-down and well put together as it is, it doesn’t have quite the bite or the subtext of Adam Wingard’s You’re Next(2011) which was a similar home-invasion film that did something surprising and subversive with its central female character – twisting slasher conventions and playing around with genre ideas in an interesting way.

Released on Netflix, the impact of Hush may be as ephemeral and muted as its title, but it is a solid and satisfying enough low-budget horror – occasionally going beyond generic conventions and offering moments of freshness and intrigue.