Horror Off-Season: The Quiet Ones

The Quiet Ones is a new horror release from the resurrected Hammer Film studio.  It's director John Pogue's 2nd feature as director.  John also served as a writer on the 2nd draft of the script, originally by Tom de Ville (who served as writer on episodes of Urban Gothic and Lexx), alongside Craig Rosenburg (The Uninvited) and Oren Moverman (Rampart).  It is sometimes worrying when a script has this many hands involved.  A single writer or a pair with solid history seem more likely to produce a horror film with common vision, while multiple writers tend to work by committee which results in a film that ultimately relies more heavily on well-worn tropes in order to keep everyone in agreement.  At least in my experience.

Set sometime in the early 1970s the story is told through an interesting combination of Found Footage-style and traditional omniscient camera.  It centers around an Oxford professor played by Jared Harris, 2 student researchers, and a student cameraman recruited through his class on the paranormal.  Dr. Coupland believes there is no supernatural and the paranormal is just science we've yet to understand.  He believes there is no such thing has haunting or possession and that these are just deep psychological conditions that can be cured through extreme therapy. Initially describing a failed attempt to cure a young child referred to as "David Q.", he then tells the class about his current experiments on a young amnesiac foster child named Jane Harper (Olvia Cooke), who claims to be possessed by an entity she calls "Evey"

In some strange combination of The Philip Experiment and Psychoplasmics from The Brood he hopes to deprive Jane of sleep and subject her to hypnotism sessions and isolation in order to expose Evey as some sort of secondary personality or hallucination and allow Jane to confront and get rid of her.  After being evicted from their original location near the university and having the experiment's funding cut by Oxford, Coupland takes his students and Jane to a house in the country where they'll be able to continue their work.  This is where the bulk of the action takes place.

I do want to go over the end and some, but that will be a spoiler tag so I'll just give my impressions.

This movie is pretty good.  I'm not as impressed by it as I was other Hammer Revival flicks like Woman in Black, but I consider this solid and I'm glad that Hammer is back.  That said, I have some criticism:  Despite having a cast of only 5 characters, there are some who are so poorly developed I feel like the movie could have done completely without them.  The non-camera students, Harry and Krissi, seem incredibly superfluous.  They deliver lines, yeah, and things happen to them, but I don't think a single thing they do is integral to the main plot.  They reveal no information and only seem to serve a b-plot that contributes nothing to the main one.  Also Coupland's character is just confusing.  We get some reveals during the ending sprint that do help to explain some of his motivations, but there's a lot he does that makes no sense.  And his continued insistence on following the preordained path of the experiment despite mounting evidence of occult involvement makes him a crappy scientist.  And I know it's petty, but the bit of dialog where they name-drop the title of the movie makes about as much sense as nipples on a duck.

I feel like the movie could've also added some psychological weight to its action to up the creep factor, and favor slow-burn lead ins more.  In the hypnotism/seance scenes, it would've been incredibly unnerving to have long, slow shots of unbroken dialog with creepy shadows and unexplained noises instead of short lead-ins to jump scares.  A final weird point is the use of a train-chugging sound effect.  It had a few points where it was effective at tension-building, but it wasn't related to anything...it just happened to be a tense and driving sound effect.

I know it sounds like a lot but everything I just talked about I felt would have made the movie better, not were needed to make it good.  It doesn't do anything egregiously wrong in my book and does a fair amount right, it just missed some opportunities to do some things really right.

That out of the way, on to the ending:

I feel like I "got" the majority of the ending, but there are a few sticking bits.  The way I took the story of the movie, as revealed by the final act, was that it's not really the Philip Experiment at all despite the face-value similarity and that lots of other reviewers mention it.  The key to the Philip Experiment is that the spirit they conjured through seances didn't exist at all, he was a complete fabrication.  However, in The Quiet Ones, the experimenters don't invent Evey, they basically prod Jane until she invents Evey.  Also, there is evidence that Brian finds of Evey actually existing when he researches the occult symbol that burns into Jane meaning that unless the power of belief retcons the spirit into existing, Evey can't be a fabrication.  After the final act reveal I think it's very clear that what actually happens is that Evey Dwyer was a real little girl who is in some way a conduit for a cult's deity/demon.  This is a bit of theory, but I think the original attempt to manifest the demon fails due to some part of Evey that was not willing to be sacrificed.  This persona becomes Jane, the amnesiac.  However, the experimenters torture and break down Jane until she loses the strength to control Evey and Evey re-asserts by re-branding Jane.

When the experimenters move out to the country and Jane reveals the name Evey, she's gathered 4 other people in a single house who believe in Evey and want her to become manifest.  She's effectively recreated the original cult, this is further evidenced by the cult mark being burned into all the experimenters during the final act.  Then Dr. Coupland kills Jane, and Brian resurrects her causing Evey to be fully reborn.  Evey, rid of Jane's persona, self-immolates which gives birth to the demon.

What I don't fully understand is why the demon/fire deity now requires possess of Brian at the very end of the movie to begin the Apocalypse.  If the demon simply needs a body, why not use Jane/Evey's?  Maybe it needs to destroy the original body to be manifested but then needs another body to work?  That just seems counterproductive.  Frankly, I feel like the whole thing is derailed by the stinger at the end that shows Brian being interrogated for the murder of Jane and the rest.  If that wasn't there the movie would've ended with the demon breaking out of J'Evey at the camera, presumably to kill Brian and wreak its havoc.  So maybe one of the several writers felt like they needed the stinger, and wanted to have the cool similarity of using the clap gesture Brian used as the camera man to begin the movie to call the end of the movie, but then never answered the questions it raised?
--PXA