Review: Hush (2/5)

Hush
(Mark Tonderai):
William Ash, Christine Bottomley, Andreas Wisniewski.
Running time: 91 minutes (16)

This low-budget British chiller plays like cat and mouse but in reverse: the mouse here is reluctantly chasing the cat. It opens with a moment of abject horror: we’re stuck in a car in the rain at night with a pair of rowing Mancunians and you realise there is no escape. Up ahead, the back door of an articulated truck momentarily lifts open and Zakes (William Ash) thinks he sees a woman tied up. The couple go to a petrol station where the domestic row spills out. It’s almost a relief, then, when Beth (Christine Bottomley) goes missing and the truck pulls away.
First-time writer/director Mark Tonderai opts for shaky, hand-held, kitchen-sink horror. The actors aren’t up to much and the plot is full of contrivances. It works up an unseen terror and then blows it with some silly, grisly gross-out. But it just about wriggles free, because you keep wondering what Zakes is going to do next. He gives chase, steals a car, gets arrested for murder, escapes and still goes after the demon truck driver. Said demon truck driver wears his hoodie up all the time so he must be anti-social. When out of the truck cab, he walks very, very slowly, as if he were weighing up in his mind the problems of bank securitisation and credit pyramids. This gives our hero time to escape various hairy predicaments.
It’s a good location for horror: the concrete soulless hinterland of Britain’s motorways and rest areas. Meanwhile, Tonderai gives a twist to the old madonna/whore genre expectation: it turns out Beth is cheating on Zakes but he doesn’t find out till much later when he reads a lewd phone text. Will he still do the honourable thing?