DVD review (region 2)
Directed by Mark Tonderai
Starring William Ash, Christine Bottomley, Andreas Wisniewski
Release date 20 July 2009

A young couple, Zakes and Beth, are travelling on the M1 one night when they spot something they shouldn’t: a young woman, half-naked and caged, screaming for help in the back of a recklessly driven truck. Zakes calls the police and washes his hands of the incident; after all, it’s not his problem. That is until his girlfriend goes missing and a familiar looking truck pulls away…

While an awful lot of great scare flicks come out of the US, they never seem to have the same raw, grimy feel as Brit-horror: from Dog Soldiers to Severance and now Mark Tonderai’s Hush, British filmmakers are never afraid to give us imperfect protaganists, floundering out of their depth and getting thoroughly beaten up in the process.

The first quarter of Hush isn’t exactly inspiring; watching the young leads argue in the cramped interior of a car gets tiring pretty quickly and it isn’t until Beth’s disappearance that things start getting exciting.

William Ash does a fabulous line in dramatic dribbling, but he isn’t very believable when he’s not thoroughly bricking it. Thankfully, he spends most of the film locked in a state of utter terror thanks to the mysterious, faceless bad guy. The ‘creepy hooded figure’ shtick has, of course, been done to death in horror films of late (in everything from Eden Lake and Them to Saw), but any Daily Mail reader knows that there’s nothing more terrifying than a hoodie.

Tonderai’s direction keeps things interesting, though there are points where you wish he’d invest in a tripod, cease with the extreme close-ups and pull events into focus. Technically speaking, the best thing about this film is the sound editing: subtle enough not to detract from the experience, but beautifully executed.

Hush is far from perfect and leaves a number of plot threads hanging loose, but you’ll find yourself forgiving it all of this. Why? Because it’s just such damn good fun. Jen Evans

VERDICT: 7/10
A flawed but fun Brit thriller.