The Quiet Ones (2014) Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Erin Richards, Rory Fleck-Byrne, Olivia Cooke Movie Review

The Quiet Ones (2014)   2/52/52/52/52/5


Olivia Cooke in The Quiet Ones (2014)

A Slow One

Brian McNeil (Sam Claflin) is one of a group of students which Oxford professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) assembles to assist him with an experiment. For Brian that involves chronicling everything with his video camera as Joseph and the other students run the experiments. The experiments involve Jane (Olivia Cooke) a troubled young woman who has gone from one foster home to another and who believes she is possessed by a doll. By making her suffer from sleep deprivation the professor hopes to cause Jane to manifest the evil energy and cast it into another doll with the intention of destroying it. But Brian becomes increasingly more curious about what is going on and soon realises all is not as it seems.

Names can create potential, you see some actor's names and you think well maybe which is the case when you spot Jared Harris and Sam Claflin in the cast of "The Quiet Ones". It is the same when you spot this is another modern Hammer horror as being Hammer it lifts your expectations. But sadly "The Quiet Ones" is another monotonous movie which aims to slowly develop the storyline but only comes across as biding time, drawing out an idea which isn't enough to sustain an hour long drama rather than one which passes the 90 minute mark.

Now we have some creepy goings on in "The Quiet Ones" and some seemingly nasty goings on as we have the experiments on Jane and the paranormal style outcome of these experiments. But there is no atmosphere here or at least not one which draws you in to the unfolding drama and so what we get are the occasional punch scenes which attempt to make you sit up and pay attention before it then tries to shock with sudden special effects. There just isn't enough storyline here and it isn't until half way through that it starts to pick things up with some developments when it comes to motive.

What this all boils down to is that "The Quiet Ones" didn't work for me and again had a feel of a movie which took a decent idea and then tried to stretch it out which did it no favours as it made it slow going during the first half as it didn't really go anywhere for a while.


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