I’ve been a fan of Hammer for a long time now, enjoying both their ‘heyday’ films and their more recent output – I loved The Woman in Black, liked Let Me In, and even The Resident had its charm. So I’ve been looking forward to The Quiet Ones for a while now – and I have to say, I’m actually disappointed.
The film was sold to me on the premise that Dr Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) is trying to create a poltergeist – and if that were indeed the plot of the film, it could have been tremendous. Instead, we see the slightly mad doctor (oh what would Cushing have done with the role?) has decided to cure Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke) of her so-called “paranormal delusions” through a process of systematic psychological torture dressed up as science. He believes he can get her to expel her negative energy in a telekinetic outburst and thus be cured. Well, it is set in the Seventies.
Unsurprisingly, Oxford University cut off the funding for the “experiment” and Dr Coupland is forced to take Jane, along with his two assistants, Harry and Chrissie, and cameraman Brian, to an old house in the middle of nowhere. There they conduct more experiments (which seem to consist of little more than sleep deprivation and the occasional seance) in which they attempt to reach Evie, a mysterious ‘entity’ who Joseph believes is nothing more than the personnification of Jane’s mental problems. I’m not 100% sure if Joseph thinks Jane is simply mad, or if he genuinely believes she has telekinetic abilities, but the film seems to come down on the side of the latter – we even see her manifest ‘teleplasm’ at one point, in the manner of early Victorian spiritualist photographs.
The film is hazy over whether or not Evie possesses Jane, or if she’s an independent being attached to Jane – at one point Evie makes loud noises all over the house, and it’s this that supports the film’s claim to investigating poltergeists. Indeed, this particular part of the film is superb, and by this point The Quiet Ones truly had my attention. But then it all falls apart in act three, when the film wanders off into the tried and true territory of cults and demonic possession. Yawn. We’ve seen this all before, and done far better, and I’m really quite disappointed. Worse still is the reliance on found footage, and shaky shots taken through Brian’s camera are tedious rather than disorientating. I’d expect this level of ‘horror’ from Lionsgate but Hammer? Come on, you can do better than this.
It’s a shame because the potential for a cracking horror film is definitely there. True, the editing is a bit shoddy (supposedly terrifying scenes of ‘supernatural activity’ are cut short, followed by completely unrelated scenes that give a disjointed feel to the whole affair) and the continual reliance on the music of Slade should surely count as torture for anyone, let alone Jane, but the sound design is terrific, and the slow build of disturbances twinned with Joseph’s steadfast inability to consider any other theories but his own leads you to anticipate disaster. Even the performances are first rate – but it’s all let down by the ‘MTVisation’ of horror that has crippled the genre of late. The Conjuring proved you could make a good, slow-burning horror film, and James Wan has done some brilliant work with his last couple of films. The Woman in Black was a superb chiller, and I think my hopes were possibly set too high as a result, and I can only give The Quiet Ones three out of five for the film it was, and four out of five for the film I wish it was.
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