Mike Flanagan's 2016 home invasion thriller, Hush, was a sleek, tense movie that pitted a deaf woman against a violent attacker, but was it all in her head?
In Hush, Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) is a writer who lives in a remote cabin in the woods with her cat and tucks herself away from society in order to work on her next novel. Though she does have neighbors and some sense of community - as well as a relationship with her sister - Maddie lives a rather lonely, though not unhappy life from what is portrayed. Even though she is perfectly capable of living a normal, day-to-day life, she becomes a more vulnerable target for her masked assailant (John Gallagher Jr) because she is both deaf and mute. The film explains that this is due to bacterial infection that she suffered when she was young.
Mike Flanagan is a cerebral filmmaker, and has gone on to have an incredible career in the horror space, contributing a film adaptation of Stephen King's follow-up novel to The Shining with 2019's Doctor Sleep. Flanagan has also won over horror television audiences with another Netflix original series, The Haunting of Hill House, which was renewed for a second season. While the film's ending does leave audiences satisfied with Maddie surviving a nightmarish encounter, there are quite a few clues scattered throughout the film that suggest that none of it actually happened.
Why Maddie's Attack Was Actually In Her Head (& Novel)
Not only is the character of Maddie Young a very interesting protagonist and final girl in that she has to outsmart her opponent without being able to use her hearing or speech, but Flanagan carefully crafts a narrative that thinks outside the box of traditional home-invasion thrillers. Though it does follow films like The Strangers in both pacing and tone, the killer is a solo hunter whose motivations are entirely unknown to the audience and remain that way. After the killer dispatches her neighbor, Sarah (Samathan Sloyan), Maddie immediately goes into a fight response, though she tries first to bargain with the killer by promising him that she won't say anything, even going as far as to show willingness to pretend that nothing - not even the murder of her own friend - happened in order to get him to leave her alone.
While this seems suspicious, it recalls a conversation she had with her neighbor earlier in the movie when Sarah returned one of the books Maddie had written after reading it, and the two speak about her writing process. Maddie explains that she likes to devise different outcomes of scenarios while she's writing and even plans out multiple endings before choosing one that will make it into the book. This is reflected during her fight with the killer, because there are multiple trick scenes where Maddie makes a decision, something bad happens to her, and the shot flashes back to her being in the same position where she started. It's almost like she's testing each potential outcome, as she does in her novels, in order to survive and thinking from every angle in order to decide her best way of making it out alive.
Though this is certainly a smart way to attempt to survive these sorts of situations in horror movies, it could also be a clue. Since Maddie is currently working on a novel - and seeming to struggle with it - maybe the entire situation is in her head. This plot was recently explored on popular CW series, Riverdale, where Jughead recruits his friends to help him stage "the perfect murder". Could all the terrifying events in Hush really just be the plot device of a very talented writer? One of the film's final shots is Maddie smiling when the police arrive; though this could be as simple as an expression of relief, it could also mean that she found the ending she wanted for her novel.