A Very Confusing (And Bad) Film!

My friend Helen and me always watch movies together while we knit clothes. We decided this holiday season to watch a 90s thriller with two strong leading ladies. The movie is called Hush, which is what I often tell Helen to do when we watch anything together.

Unfortunately this was a very odd and badly woven script. Gwyneth Paltrow (in one of her five films roles from 1998) plays a plucky, dewy young thing who is engaged to a beautiful looking man Helen referred to as "Ken Doll". This is because despite looking fine, the actor playing him is devoid any human emotion or acting ability. Paltrow and her fiance drive out to the countryside and meet the man's mother, played by Jessica Lange. As the best part of the film, it's too bad Lange is still a confusing character; she talks in a southern twang, and seems to treat her son more like a boyfriend then her own flesh and blood. She doesn't take to Paltrow very well until Paltrow becomes pregnant; then it starts getting even more weird. The boyfriend insist they marry right away, and suddenly Lange is spiking Paltrow's dessert with poison so she'll lose the baby. Earlier, Paltrow is robbed and almost loses the child- and Helen and me think Lange set this up too.

We got bored to really pay attention after the pie scene. It just isn't a good film. Paltrow's work colleague, for example, talks like she's in a completely different movie- somewhere in the 1980s with a horrible New York accent. Random characters like this pop up all over the place, and they don't really serve a purpose.

Hush is almost like Rosemary's Baby in the sense that the central character is a blonde naive woman who is pregnant, and being fooled by everyone around her - including her own husband. In this case, Paltrow is Mia Farrow, Lange is Ruth Gordon, and Ken Doll is - well, you get the idea.