Maybe everyone else at Oxford was into prog rock instead. “Cure one patient,” he boasts, “you cure all mankind.” Coupland’s messianic mission is so daft, he’s managed to harvest just two disciples - eager, eye-candy students Krissi (Erin Richards) and Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne). Maverick Oxford University psychology professor Joseph Coupland (Mad Men’s Jared Harris) is determined to prove that Jane’s affliction is literally all in her head by harnessing and “harvesting” this negative mental energy – like removing a cancer sufferer’s tumour. So here our patient, teenager Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke from TV’s Bates Motel), a mentally disturbed orphan, is supposedly possessed by a malevolent spirit named Evey. The horror, the horror.Play Using the convenient ‘Based on Actual Events’ alibi to strengthen its credentials, The Quiet Ones repurposes 1972’s ‘Philip Experiment’ in Toronto, Canada, in which academic researchers tried to “create” a ghost and so prove such spirits aren’t actually from a spiritual realm but in fact constructed by the human psyche (2012’s The Apparition dabbled in the same premise). Mostly, they suggest that film stock itself, which has been almost entirely displaced by digital, has already become a ghost haunting the cinema. Pogue switches between these counterfeited formats well enough, if mechanically, and they add little to the story’s meaning or the movie’s visual texture. Yet many of the movie’s more nominally horrific elements are too familiar, including the spooky boy with the dead eyes who appears in the digitally produced black-and-white eight-millimeter film that - like Brian’s similarly faked 16-millimeter footage - is woven into the main narrative. There are nice touches, like the short scene at Oxford in which an angry Coupland, striding across a green lawn with his black gown flapping, evokes a malevolent raven. Pogue - working from a script credited to him, Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman and Tom de Ville - deploys the typical shock cuts and loud, abrupt noises that produce small jolts (“Boo!” moments) that dissipate as swiftly as popped soap bubbles. There, Coupland pushes Jane to reach deeper into her tortured mind, while Mr. After objections to Coupland’s methods lead to his experiment’s being shut down, he moves her and a team, including Brian and two students, Krissi (Erin Richards) and Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne), off campus and into a dilapidated, isolated house with poor lighting and creaky floorboards. Pogue doesn’t push the God angle hard, even if he does hang a cross around the neck of the credulous lug, Brian (Sam Claflin), whom Coupland hires to film his work with Jane. Demons and God tend to go together, which may be one reason why both the supernatural and Christianity are enjoying a big-screen moment, sometimes in the same movie. Harris, who excels at men in the shadows, delivers the only performance of merit.) As in other horror tales with doctors and scientists, the darkness in “The Quiet Ones” emerges during the struggle between an ostensibly rational mind and the creatures that are manifestations of irrationality and, by their very existence, emblems of religious faith. An Oxford University lecturer, Coupland believes that the supernatural occurrences in Jane’s bleak, lonely life have been created by her mind and is using every bad idea he has - including curing her through sleep deprivation - to prove it.Ĭoupland may believe that Jane is psychologically damaged and that her mind is creating the spooky stuff that has haunted her throughout life, but it’s quickly clear that he’s one of the genre’s foolish and flawed men of science. A fair amount of this noise seems to emanate from Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), a hollow-eyed young patient of Professor Coupland (Jared Harris). By then its director, John Pogue, has made a modest racket with the usual bumps in the night, some cackling and screaming, a bit of door slamming and table knocking. The title of “The Quiet Ones,” the latest horror movie about supernatural doings set in the 1970s, is explained fairly late.
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