Quiet Ones, The (2014) [Blu-ray]
Horror

Tagline: Something unspeakable is happening to Jane Harper.

Inspired by terrifying real experiments. When a crazed university professor (Jared Harris) and his team of students set out to cure a disturbed patient, the unthinkable happens. Trusting in their leader and his motives, Brian (Sam Claflin) and his fellow students find themselves far from help... and all too close to a sinister force they never suspected.

Storyline: A university professor and a team of students conduct an experiment on a young woman, uncovering terrifyingly dark, unexpected forces in the process.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 19, 2014 -- The illustrious imprint of Hammer Films has been struggling to rise from the dead like a slightly arthritic Christopher Lee stumbling around one of those old sixties' Dracula outings that defined the studio for a generation of horror fans. Hammer's track record since its revival has been spotty at best, with high profile efforts like Let Me In withering, but equally high profile efforts like The Woman in Black doing more than respectable business. The Quiet Ones may not be the best example of a tie-breaker, for in many ways it's not really in the traditional mold of a Hammer enterprise to begin with. Emphasizing psychological angst over on-screen gore (something it shares with The Woman in Black), The Quiet Ones bears that always questionable imprimatur of supposedly having been based on actual events, which some cynics may decide is nothing more than the film's passing allusions to so-called "Skinner Boxes". There actually is some little known research project where a bunch of experimenters attempted to "harvest" their emotional energy that serves as the "fact" based element of The Quiet Ones, but the real fact here is that ultimately it doesn't matter if The Quiet Ones is ripped from today's (or yesterday's) headlines or merely the artifice of an overheated screenwriter's imagination, for it's a curiously uninspired horror tale that never lives up to its potential. The ancient dialectic between science and religion provides the subtext for this tale of a young woman who is either seriously mentally ill or possessed. A crusading 1970s Oxford professor named Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) has assumed control (in every sense of the word) of an abandoned girl named Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), keeping her imprisoned in a tiny room where he subjects her to nonstop sensory assault courtesy of flashing lights and loud music (even worse—loud seventies music). Coupland is absolutely convinced whatever is afflicting Jane can be quantified and physically extracted from the girl, thereby making her Patient Zero in Coupland's efforts to "cure Mankind" of all such mental and/or emotional disabilities. If The Quiet Ones had had the courage to stick to this thesis, it might have provided at least a modicum of chills and thrills as Jane's devolving state makes the experiments surrounding her more and more treacherous. Instead, The Quiet Ones opts for more pedestrian scares like booming sounds emanating from the subwoofers to instill a modicum of adrenaline rushes in the audience. When the film finally surrenders to a completely rote "explanation" for the seemingly supernatural phenomena attending Jane's predicament, the Satanic handwriting is already firmly scrawled on the Skinner Box wall.

Coupland has brought in Oxford A/V nerd Brian McNeil (Sam Claflin) to run some old movies of a long ago experiment for a class Coupland is helming at the august university. The film shows a young boy coloring a scary looking man (who kind of resembles Klaus Kinski, enough to give any child nightmares). When an unseen interviewer asks the boy about the man he's sketching, the boy looks at the camera, at which point all poltergeist hell breaks loose. Coupland's assertion is that this activity is psychologically based and can be cured if only the right techniques are found. He's an obvious rationalist working in very irrational territory.

The somewhat obsessive professor approaches Brian and asks him if he would be willing to document on film his current research project, the young woman named Jane Harper. Brian is a bit reticent, but brings his almost comically unwieldy "portable" video unit to a flat where Coupland has more or less imprisoned Jane in an isolated room where he's convinced if he simply assault her with enough bad sensory input, she'll start manifesting negative phenomena which can then be successfully dealt with. Helping Coupland are two other students who seem to be involved with each other, Krissy (Erin Richards) and Harry (Rory Fleck-Adams).

In a completely unsurprising development, Brian finds himself drawn to Jane's predicament, and once the university pulls the funding on Coupland's project and the professor moves the group to a house in the country to continue his research, Brian becomes increasingly concerned that what Coupland is doing to Jane is not helping, but hurting. Jane seems to be possessed—or at least haunted—by a young girl named Evey, and Coupland attempts to get her to physicalize the possession by giving Jane a doll that he wants her to project her "negative energy" into, hoping that will help her to clear her mind. Of course, there's something quite different actually happening, and soon the entire house is awash in various unexplained phenomena. Meanwhile, Brian and Jane have begun a halting romance. What could possibly go wrong?

The problem with many modern day horror films is that they often feel the need to depict everything for the audience, without leaving any room for ambiguity or interpretation. The Quiet Ones actually has a rather promising premise, and if it had more skillfully threaded the needle as to whether or not Jane was "merely" mad (as opposed to possessed), it might have made for a fairly riveting experience. Instead, the film wants to have it both ways (i.e., Jane is mad and possessed—at least after a fashion), and like many contemporary horror outings, everything is just laid out for the viewer without any subtlety. The film devolves into an absolute mess in its final half hour or so, with Coupland going Grand Guignol and a series of fairly gruesome deaths supposedly upping the general anxiety level.

The Quiet Ones also tries to hedge its bets in a stylistic way as well. Because Brian is supposedly documenting everything that's going on, the film ping pongs between straight narrative and a kind of quasi-found footage approach that shows Brian's camerawork. It's a patently silly artifice that adds nothing to the film (except for a certain amount of illogic—simply keep track of where Brian is and where he supposedly films events for some salient examples). While performances are generally solid, The Quiet Ones really only manages to jolt its audience with trite effects like loud thuds on the soundtrack. That seems almost willfully ironic, given the film's title.

The Quiet Ones is passably effective at a couple of key junctures, but it tends to undercut its effectiveness with an overly literal visual treatment (including some pretty lame CGI). This story requires a much more ambivalent perspective to really hit home, and instead The Quiet Ones lays everything out in a neat little row, with no room for interpretation. Technical merits (especially the audio) are quite strong for those considering a purchase.

[CSW] -1.2- Jump scares, jump scares, jump scares… those make up the entire movie. A team of Oxford University researchers conduct an "experiment" on a young girl who harbors strange secrets. They give her a creepy doll then lock her in a creepy mansion, where she does creepy things like stand there silently and OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT SOUND!???? The jump scares are all added in by the sound editors to fool you into thinking something scary just happened. When horror movies overindulge in such cheap tricks, it's usually a sign that they've run out of ideas, but this below average rudimentary horror film doesn't seem to have had any ideas to begin with. It's a muddled and this over used demonic possession tale is victimized by bad writing and excessive editing. Skip it.
[V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

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