The Quiet Ones ***
Dir: John Pogue.
With: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Olivia Cooke. 98 mins. Cert: 15
The resuscitated Hammer
Films’ latest is a shrewd bit of retrofitting that – like its US equivalent The Conjuring – reverses the Paranormal Activity bandwagon back to
the early 1970s. A suavely patrician Jared Harris is the Oxford professor
keeping a traumatised, possibly possessed young girl (Olivia Cooke) under lock
and key for research purposes; Sam Claflin the virginal camera enthusiast who’s
enlisted to document any breakthrough, only to wind up recording a series of
increasingly loud bangs and crashes. The latter form an obvious concession to
multiplex mores, but they can’t entirely obscure the more resonant dynamics
between the professor and his acolytes, set to wondering whether these tests
aren’t just extending the girl’s distress. Perhaps too business-minded to be
distinctively scary – the team’s deployment of Slade as a wake-up call is the
sole idiosyncrasy – it’s nevertheless better played than most: the arrestingly
fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.
The Quiet Ones is in cinemas nationwide.
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