The Quiet Ones (Jared Harris, Sam Claflin) – Movie Review

Jared Harris battles a weak screenplay and underpowered direction as an arrogant Oxford University physics professor who assembles a small team of students to conduct an experiment on a teenage girl (Olivia Cooke) with psychiatric problems, after taking her from an asylum. He’s got some bonkers idea that poltergeists spring from troubled minds!

This creaky Exorcist-style Brit chiller product of the revived Hammer Films is claimed by the producer to be the kind of movie Hammer should have been making in 1974, when the movie’s set, if they hadn’t lost their way. Unfortunately, he’s got this all wrong.

Hammer would have gone out of business even earlier if they’d been making a damp squib like this. It’s a shock-less and scare-free zone, though you can have a few giggles at its expense. The screenplay doesn’t make the most of its silly situation, either in terms of characters, storyline or jumps, the acting (Harris apart) is desperately ordinary, and the Oxford and 70s period backgrounds are pointless, poorly used and wasted.

Cast before he became a star with his Finnick Odair character in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Sam Claflin is easy on the eye but otherwise doesn’t make much of an impression.

Harris may be fine, but just think how much better Peter Cushing would have been in the star role, or what, say, John Hurt could do with it today.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com