Director: John Pogue
Writers: Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman, John Pogue
Stars: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Olivia Cooke
The Quiet Ones, Hammer’s follow up to the phenomenally successful The Woman in Black, is a similar but distinct affair. It’s another ghost story – kind of – with a period setting, this time in the early 1970s rather than a century or so ago; and this time round it’s based on an original screenplay rather than based on a venerable literary source.
The story plays like a cross between The Chemical Wedding and When the Lights Went Out, without the crazy entertainment value of the former or the gritty realism of the latter. Oxford Don Professor Coupland (Jared Harris) is convinced that, when prompted by the right kind of experimental psychology, mental illness can be projected out of the body and summarily excised. He assembles a team of students to test out the theory, as well as a cameraman (Sam Claflin) and a test subject, Jane (Olivia Cooke), a deeply disturbed young woman who has been in and out of asylums since childhood. After locking themselves up in an out of the way country house they begin their experiments, although it soon becomes clear that Coupland has several issues of his own… and that his theory may be all too right.
This is a film that probably suffers from weight of expectation: coming after The Woman in Black it never had that much of a chance, in terms of both box office and quality. In fact it’s a solid film, gripping enough and not badly made. The acting, in particular, is excellent, with the woefully underused Jared Harris putting in an excellent performance and Olivia Cooke also making an impression. But the problem is that there isn’t really anything new about it all, especially for those who are familiar with the genre; and without the involvement of a marquee name (albeit a wooden marquee name) such as Daniel Radcliffe the more casual viewer is unlikely to seek it out. Furthermore, the direction of John Pogue – who is better known as the scriptwriter of US Marshalls and Ghost Ship – lacks innovation and allows the whole thing to become bogged down, leading to an eding which is in equal parts bathetic and ludicrous.
