Mike Flanagan has deservedly carved out a reputation as one of horror’s leading lights by consistently delivering intense, atmospheric, and acclaimed chillers that gleefully hop from subgenre to subgenre with reckless abandon, but 2016’s Hush still ranks as his best-reviewed film or television title ever.
The single-location psychological nightmare unfolds in, out, and around an isolated house in the woods, where a hard-of-hearing author attempts to overcome her writers’ block by way of self-imposed solitude that eliminates any potential distractions. At least, until a masked killer arrives on the scene and makes it their mission to bring her life to an end.
Cobbled together for a paltry budget of only a million dollars, Flanagan managed to make the most of the limited resources at his disposal and then some, with a phenomenal performance from wife Kate Siegel anchoring the narrative and elevating it well above the standard tropes and trappings of the home invasion thriller.
Boasting a 93 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, standing tall as the single top-rated entry in a filmography that’s never seen anything drop below the 60 percent threshold even after 11 projects is a heck of an achievement. In fact, Hush proved so popular that it ended up being remade twice in the same year by the same filmmaker, with Chakri Toleti helming both the Tamil-language Kolaiyuthir Kaalam and Hindi Khamoshi in 2019, which were released less than two months apart.
It’s the OG that’s back up to its old tricks on streaming, though, with FlixPatrol revealing that Max subscribers have bolted the doors, hunkered down, and propelled the movie straight towards the upper echelons of the platform’s most-watched charts.