The Quiet Ones - Movie Review

Well I'm not quite sure what I was expecting with this new horror flick. The possession section of horror movies have fallen under the same generic formula, and I'm afraid to say The Quiet Ones is no exception. Its opening credits is filled with random demonic possession pictures from varying, old looking books. Typical, typical. And very quickly it's evident they will not be using actual suspense or horror to keep the audiences interested. Instead, quite ironically, The Quiet Ones uses extremely loud jump scares to keep their audiences tense. But the problem with doing that is there's absolutely no lingering effect that'll give people a reason to remember the movie.

For starters, the acting is actually not bad. Except for the ridiculous and awful acting from Jared Harris, which I'll get to in just a moment. Our teen/early 20's leads are all decent and fairly good with their characters. They can all play scared shitless, sex crazed, and stupid. Everything you need to be a young actor in a horror movie. They all did fine. The one performance that made no sense was Jared Harris, who plays the investigator leading the experiment, trying to cure a girl named Jane who is possessed. His character starts off normal, then all of a sudden he's being the most unprofessional and stupid investigator I've ever seen. He spontaneously throws hissy fits, yells at all his helpers, and has absolutely no morals. He's definitely the worst part about this movie.

Now onto the actual story. It all plays out pretty much how I expected it. I'll even give it some credit for having some genuinely scary camera work and tension building. But once something happened, the excitement quickly waned and the movie just started playing the "guess when our next jump scare is" game. The one thing that I think killed everything the movie had going for it was the god awful ending.

SPOILERS

The end literally builds up this huge conspiracy about what this possessed girl has gone through. It builds up her story and they all get very close to possibly curing her for good, which is what this entire movie is about. The whole plot is finding out what is wrong with her and how to kill it. So how do they end it? She randomly explodes into flames and everyone dies except the cameraman, who is imprisoned and charged for everyone's deaths in the experiments. Are you kidding me?!

Overall, it's loud, packed with jump scares, decent acting, and an semi-interesting plot that is quickly slaughtered by its cop out ending. Is it worth a watch after all that? Surprisingly, I'd say it's a fun one to watch at a Netflix movie night, but definitely don't pay to see this. It's entertaining, but don't expect anything different and genre-changing.