Review: The Quiet Ones Now, I’ve been excited for this for some time. It’s made
Review: The Quiet Ones Now, I’ve been excited for this for some time. It’s made by Hammer, who gave us the fantastic The Woman In Black, it’s had some great trailers, and it has a few decent actors thrown in to the mix. So, how did it turn out? Well the good news is that it’s scary. The story follows a scientist in 1974 who is experimenting on a girl who he believes is manifesting supernatural powers that he can cure, and he enlists two students and a cameraman to help him and to document everything. As they work to separate what on the surface seems to be an evil spirit from the girl, the danger escalates until of course there is a violent and dramatic conclusion. The film has a few real strengths. It is unrelentingly creepy throughout, the scares are often unpredictable and include a few good fake outs, the atmosphere is great thanks to good sets and costumes, and the idea to have a lot of the film seen through the flickering poor quality of the 1970’s era camera filming the proceedings is genius. It escapes the well worn tropes of found footage while maintaining the strengths of that media. So what’s wrong with it you say? Well, unfortunately its failures rest solely with the plot. It has a good premise, it plays with science versus evil well, keeps the audience guessing, and towards the end looks set to unveil a real kicker of a plot line that will explain what’s going on. The problem is it never does. Story threads are left unexplored, or even totally forgotten, and what seems like the build up to a fantastic ending is totally undermined by the fact that the film provides close to zero actual explanation. I know film goers don’t like endless exposition and of course it’s often better to leave doubt and mystery in the viewer’s mind, but The Quiet Ones leaves just about everything up to interpretation, and it will leave you scratching your head. To add to this, there seems to be no discernible reason for the film to be called The Quiet Ones. Right near the end a totally irrelevant character speaks the words but illuminates precisely nothing, cheapening the film in the process by forcing the name drop. In the end The Quiet Ones suffers from being all style and no real substance. As a horror film, it succeeds with flying colours in many ways, but without a proper story to make it worthwhile it ends up feeling a little pointless. It’s fun, creepy and tense, but ultimately very unsatisfying. A missed opportunity. Overall Rating: 5/10 -- source link
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