Hush (2009) DVD

The motorway network stands in for the more traditional lakeside cabin in this low budget British thriller, the debut feature from writer/director Mark Tonderai. Zakes and Beth are a couple whose relationship is on the slide; the former replaces posters in toilets but has aspirations to be novelist while the driving motivation of the latter is to ditch her current partner in favour of someone else. In between the pair’s bickering, Zakes catches a glimpse of what he believes to be a screaming woman chained up in the back of a lorry. Dutifully Beth calls the police, but her frustration at her boyfriend’s lack of empathy in what appears to be a kidnapping is the final straw, and causes her to finally walk out before helpfully going missing herself.

What follows is a serviceable, if wholly predictable film, where the hapless hero traipses through the narrative conventions of both the horror and the road movie as he encounters junkyards, industrial wastelands, spooky farmhouses and a faceless truck driver who appears in the credits as The Tarman. There is some inventive violence, and something of a 1970s quality to Hush, which borrows its villainous vehicle from Duel and blends the faded industrial grandeur of Get Carter and the creepy rural quality of Straw Dogs in its locations. These qualities don’t rescue the film from mediocrity however, as Tonderai struggles to stamp his mark on the material and so fails to get much further beyond a pastiche of these earlier films. The script is the main problem with the performances limited by some truly terrible dialogue while workaday plotting moves the characters far too sluggishly between each of the set pieces. The thrills are played out a little too quickly to offer much in the way of tension while The Tarman’s lumbering ineptitude prevents him from even scratching at the iconic villains who occupy the horror Hall of Fame. What makes a great genre film isn’t necessarily a huge budget, but invention and creativity; hopefully Tonderai’s next work will have more of both.