THE QUIET ONES – The Review

Jane Harper is not the only thing that needs saving in LIONSGATE ‘s new 70’s horror film THE QUIET ONES.

Inspired by true events, THE QUIET ONES tells the story of Professor Joseph Coupland and his team of researchers as they attempt to cure an abandoned foster child named Jane who has been surrounded by strange and alarming behavior her entire life. As their experiments begin to unfold, they recruit a young camera man named Sam to document their findings. What they don’t realize is that they may be dealing with something bigger than mental psychosis. They may be dealing with the supernatural.

Director John Pogue set out to build on the screenplay THE PHILIP EXPERIMENT, written by Tom de Ville, and incorporate the fascination of parapsychology and social scientific research of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s with a horror film.

‘The Philip Experiment was an experiment conducted in Toronto in the 1970’s where researchers set out to prove that the phenomenon of poltergeists are just manifestations of emotional energy. The group of parapsychologists were testing the theory that by combining their thoughts on the idea of Philip, a ghost that they had invented, and concentrating together for long periods of time, they could manifest the make-believe ghost in physical form, or at least spawn his generate his energy for communication purposes. Although the ghost never did appear, they did begin to experience knocking, table shakes, and even the table beginning to hover. Although the documented part of their experiments, no solid proof was found to support or disprove their findings, especially since no real tests were conducted, or controls set. Just a group of researchers huddled over a table. The experiments were deemed inconclusive.

It seems like a great idea to play off of due to the heightened curiosity of the supernatural in the academic world during this time period, along with all of the other various experiments that were being conducted, but somewhere along the way they missed the mark. The film didn’t really have an area of focus, leading to long, dragging moments that were only interrupted by cheap jump scares. They only loosely talk about their experiments, so we’re stuck just watching a silly spinning light as Professor Coupland talks to Jane, or Professor Coupland strapping her down to a table that seems to be electrified. When they all finally come to their senses and realize that the occult, and that there are supernatural forces are at play they briefly touch on the real back story, and within fifteen minutes the movie is over. Talk about the paranormal stuff, or the experiments, or anything else! Pick something and focus on it so we are made to care. Oh, and if you blink you will completely miss the reason why this film is called THE QUIET ONES. Apparently, that was the nickname that the group has obtained on campus because they won’t talk about their research outside of the group. This is brought up in a very quick scene, in passing, and there is no way to figure it out on our own since they are in isolation during the entire film, and have zero scenes where they socialize with others. How do we know they’re quiet about what they do if you don’t show them in a silent situation?

I don’t know if I’ve shared my rant on jump scares in a while, so if you’ve heard it before please indulge me. A jump scare or two in a film is fun. After the scare, it generally makes us all giggle and it lightens the mood allowing for us to go on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. As they say, “You can’t have the good without the bad.” The same goes for the placement of comedy in horror, which is why I tend to gravitate towards the scary movies of the 70’s and 80’s. Having said that, a film that solely relies on jump scares to frighten their audience are terrible. You’re just taking cheap shots at your audience. This usually happens for one of two reasons. Reason 1 : You have a terrible script. You are unable, or just don’t care enough to write a story that has the ability to horrify an audience. Either that, or you only realize during editing that something is seriously missing and decide to fill the void with an abundance of meaningless scares. Reason 2 : You think that horror fans are naive, and this is all we are looking for in a film. Wrong. In the case of this film, I’m leaning towards the theory that they realized that the story was flat, and decided to spice it up. Unfortunately, scaring the shit out of the audience by basically yelling ‘BOO’ at them couldn’t disguise the mundane lag of the story.

Despite a lack of character development in the story, the acting in this film is quite enjoyable. Jared Harris gives a brilliant performance as Professor Joseph Coupland. His character shows a wide range of emotions and depth, and carries the audience through the movie. Olivia Cooke brings a likeablity to her disturbing character of Jane. Although we’ve seen the young girl in the white gown with dark hair a million times in horror films, I think she did a good job of making her character stand out. They did her character, as well as the other characters, an injustice by failing to explore them a bit further. Especially her character though. She does a great job making the audience care about her, despite knowing why. This is certainly more of a muted down role for Sam Claflin than we have seen in the past, and it suited him well. Coming off of movies such as THE HUNGER GAMES : CATCHING FIRE, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN : ON STRANGER TIDES, and SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN  it was a smart move to pick a role where he took on a different type of character. I just really wish the story complimented all of their hard work.

They shot this film in both 35mm and 16mm, to differentiate between the narrative world, and the real-time world through the eyes of Sam as he filmed it. I actually enjoyed this. Although I think the fake reality horror shake-cam films are a bit played out, the look and feel of this felt true to the time period, and was rather inviting. If they would have stuck to this and beefed up the story without all the cheap scares, and cheesy ending I would be a happy camper. This had the potential to be a great horror film.

I really wanted to like this film, but THE QUIET ONES should really take a cue from its name and keep silent.

OVERALL RATING : 2 out of 5 stars

FOR MORE INFO:

WEBSITE : http://thequietonesmovie.com/
FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/thequietonesmovie
TWITTER : http://twitter.com/lionsgatehorror
HASHTAG : #TheQuietOnes

THE QUIET ONES opens in theaters today