Hush (2016)
October 15, 2025 • Review • David
Mike Flanagan’s Hush is an intimate, exploration of survival and sensory isolation, elevated by Kate Siegel’s astonishing performance as Maddie Young, a deaf and mute novelist who lives alone in a secluded cabin in the woods. From the opening scenes, the film establishes her life of quiet self-sufficiency. We see her cooking, writing, and FaceTiming with her best friend Sarah, all underscored by the stillness of her world — a silence that is not peaceful, but fragile.
That tranquility is shattered when a masked intruder appears outside her home. What begins as a routine evening transforms into a prolonged, silent nightmare. Sarah is the first victim. In one of the film’s most devastating moments, she runs to Maddie’s door, pounding and screaming for help as blood soaks her shirt. The camera cuts to Maddie inside, completely unaware of the violence occurring just feet away. The audience hears the desperate cries, but Maddie’s world is utterly still. This contrast becomes the film’s central engine of dread, using sound, or the absence of it, to create unbearable tension.
After killing Sarah, the intruder realizes Maddie is deaf, and the dynamic shifts. He removes his mask, confident that she cannot call for help or even hear him moving. Yet Maddie proves to be far from helpless. When she discovers the intruder’s presence, after seeing him through the glass door, Flanagan stages a cat-and-mouse game that unfolds almost entirely without dialogue. Maddie’s deafness transforms into a double-edged sword: she cannot hear his footsteps or gunshots, but her silence allows her to move unnoticed as well.
Throughout the film, Siegel communicates Maddie’s terror, resolve, and ingenuity without uttering a sound. Her performance relies on subtle physical cues, tightened shoulders, controlled breathing, darting eyes, and it’s astonishing how much emotion she conveys with such restraint. When she writes “Do it. Kill me.” on the glass door in a defiant moment of confrontation, the words become a primal scream in a movie that otherwise exists in quiet.
Flanagan and Siegel, who co-wrote the screenplay, keep the story lean and efficient, confined almost entirely to Maddie’s home. The setting becomes both fortress and prison. Every creak of the floorboard, every flash of light, every movement outside her window takes on life-or-death importance. By the time Maddie turns her attacker’s overconfidence against him, using her wits and knowledge of her environment to fight back, the audience has been pulled in.
In the end, Hush is not just a slasher film — it’s a study in perspective, vulnerability, and empowerment. The film transforms silence into both terror and strength, and Kate Siegel’s portrayal of Maddie anchors it in raw, human truth. Her deafness isn’t treated as a gimmick, but as the lens through which we experience survival itself. The result is a horror film that feels immediate, personal, and profoundly unsettling, reminding us that the scariest sounds are sometimes the ones we can’t hear at all.
