Hush

Horrorphile

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Hush

July 14th 2009 00:15

From the same UK indie production company that made Donkey Punch (2008), Warp X, comes another low-budget horror-thriller, riding the suspense levels up as high as the filmmakers can muster. Although the direction and editing are tight, the performances are average, and the screenplay is so slender it borders on anorexic. What am I saying?! Hush (2008) was riddled with holes.

Zakes (um, is that meant to sound like a cross between "Yikes!" and "Zounds!"?) (William Ash) and his girlfriend Beth (Christine Bottomley) are having a lovers’ tiff. They’re driving along the M1 in pouring rain so Zakes can deliver his less than stellar job of putting up advertising posters in service stations. Beth has a less than stellar secret involving an act of indiscretion oh her behalf, but despite her frustration with Zakes she doesn’t disclose it.

William Ash as Zakes

As Beth snoozes Zakes sees something that causes him great distress: a truck pulls in front and for a brief moment he sees a naked, bloodied woman try and open the rear roller door. When the truck stops at a toll booth Zakes tries to confirm what he thought he saw. Beth insists they contact police, and Zakes calls on his phone, but they’ve got no licence plate number to report.

Christine Bottomley as Beth

Later at a service station where they’ve followed the truck Beth decides she’s had enough of Zakes and walks out on him. Zakes is taunted by drunken football hooligans, spooked by the truck driver, and manhandled by security. When he searches for Beth he discovers she’s been kidnapped, and he goes in hot pursuit of the truck, but only after carjacking someone else’s as the hooligans have spiked his tyres.

The rest of the movie is a cat and mouse game that ratchets up the suspense and throws logic and plausibility out the window. Hush (with its pretentious title) has been marketed like Speilberg’s brilliant exercise in terrormatics, Duel (1971), right down to a cover image that doesn’t even appear in the movie (the truck bearing down on a sprinting Zakes), but also takes inspiration from two other vastly superior movies; The Vanishing (1988) and Breakdown (1996).

Zakes hides from the faceless villian

I have numerous problems with this movie, even though I enjoyed a lot of the focus-dampened visual style (which will probably annoy some viewers) and the gloomy, rain-sodden mood (oh, so English). The chief irk is the central villain, the driver of the truck, credited as The Tarman (huh?). He just ain’t scary. The audience is deprived of ever seeing his face, he strolls, hoodie obscuring his face, without a care in the world, assuming no one can escape him so there’s no need to move swiftly. It’s damn silly. His motives are never expressed whatsoever, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but with no face and no reasoning, his menace is utterly eviscerated. The suspense is palpable, but the true terror is entirely absent.

Zakes hides again from the faceless villian

The jumps in plausibility leave a lot to be desired and I’m not about to start a check list here, suffice to say Zakes manages to elude the villain and retain his pursuit with ridiculous ease. Then there’s the odd criminal connections involving a security guard from the service station, and the female victim who escapes the truck and feebly assists Zakes. The guard has an extra scene which occurs a minute into the end credits. This kind of bullshit trend of revealing a little more to those who stick around so to speak is pointless.

The best stuff of Hush works more like a show reel for director Mark Tonderai’s talent with visual economy, and the use of tension through editing. It’s a movie that is far more gripping than it should be, I’ll give it that. But it has no genuine dramatic oomph (a key plot revelation for Zakes involving Beth’s betrayal completely fizzles) and for a movie where realism is paramount it relies too much on urgency, and that wears thin.

Here's the trailer: