Hush is a 2016 horror movie written and directed by Mike Flanagan and stars his wife, Kate Siegel, who is also a co-writer.
Kate plays a woman named Maddie Young, an author who moves to the woods to write her next book after a great previous release. One night during a writing attempt, a masked man comes to her house and terrorizes her. This results in a night game of cat-and-mouse until the masked man is taken down.
There’s one important factor in all of this: Maddie is deaf.
Maddie became sick at 13 which resulted in hearing loss and without the use of her vocal cords after surgery. So when you watch this house invasion happen, it’s not like every other one you’ve seen. Those victims use their eyes and ears, but Maddie cannot. Viewers watch in bigger anticipation because she’s more at risk.
It makes for an interesting movie, one that I myself even love the idea of, but the execution itself falls flat.
The biggest fall of all is the fact that Kate is a hearing woman, not deaf, and Mike is a hearing man. They had no knowledge or experience of Deaf people, Deaf community, or ASL.
Kate’s character knows ASL, and has been using ASL since she became deaf. I imagine that Maddie is supposed to be in her early 30s as Kate was 34-years-old when the movie came out. That is 21 years of using ASL, yet she signs as if she just started learning. She has next to no facial expressions throughout her signing, something that’s important to have as ASL uses facial expressions and mouth morphemes as part of the grammar.
It’d be one thing if Maddie lived a life similar to mine, where she continued to live through a predominantly hearing world where her friends and family also didn’t sign, so she didn’t have the opportunity to use it consistently. But given the fact that she can’t speak due to her vocal words being of no use, it’s safe to assume that ASL is her main language.
One moment that’s good in this film is that she has flashing lights in her house to alert her to alarms. But when she’s outside sitting on the porch for a moment, the lights start flashing and she’s not noticing it. These lights are meant to be extremely strong so you’re aware. How is she not noticing them?
The most infamous scene in Hush is when her neighbor is being murdered by the masked man. Maddie is in the kitchen at her stove and her neighbor body slams herself into her glass door, furiously and repeatedly slamming her fist on it. Just mere feet away from her. And somehow Maddie is completely obvious to this happening. I’ve lived in 370, 475, and now 646 square feet and I am very well aware in all places when things are getting banged on in the hallway and the units above me. There’s no way that Maddie wouldn’t have been able to feel her neighbor fighting for her life at her door a mere ten steps away.
The controversy surrounding Hush is obvious. Maddie is a deaf character played by a hearing actor. When the Deaf community called this out, Mike said that a reason he didn’t want a deaf actor is because at the end of the film, Maddie has an internal monologue so Kate is the voice of that. They “needed” a hearing person to perform that role.
But he really didn’t. Oral deaf people exist. There are deaf people who speak and sign. Or you still could’ve gotten a deaf actor for the role while having Kate voice the monologue. We know Mike puts his wife in everything and he still could’ve made that happen for this.
The Deaf community, myself included, went back and forth with Mike and Kate on Twitter for a while on this. Kate went to block a bunch of us. Mike would go back and forth with the community, often mocking people in his tweets. I can’t remember if he blocked any of us, but I wouldn’t put it past him.
Instead of Kate playing this role, we could’ve had Shoshannah Stern or Sandra Mae Frank play Maddie. Sandra may have been a bit too young for the role, but she’s had experience playing this type of character in short films and recently again in The Silent Hour. Shoshannah herself has a few gun swinging chops from her role in Jericho.
Hush had the perfect opportunity to give a Deaf actor a moment to break into the spotlight with this film and he threw that away to put all the spotlight on his wife. Maddie was such an easy role to give to a Deaf actor and the fact that they continued to die on the hill of “it’s too hard” is absurd.