Hush (1998)

Jessica Lange has earned enough accolades, including a Best Actress Oscar for Blue Sky, that a person tends to forget she's also capable of scenery-chewing histrionics that are rife with self-parody. In Hush, she submits just such a performance, due in no small part to the inexperience of director Jonathan Darby. Her Kentucky-fried mother-in-law from hell (with Oedipal tendencies) is actually toned down a bit -- they reshot the original ending almost two years later, excising footage of Lange screaming and brandishing a butcher knife (but, confusingly, leaving such footage in the trailers). While the new ending is more life-sized, it's also so boring and anticlimactic that it hardly helps. Never mind that the actors look noticeably older in the final scene, and their work seems dissociated from the rest of the film. Nothing Hush might do would make it anything more than what it is: the type of cheesy, paint-by-numbers domestic thriller in which only the victim can see the torturous behavior of her tormentor, while everyone else (most crucially, her husband) is blind to it. If Darby occasionally does something smart and chilling, he quickly returns to the status quo of clichés and melodrama. As tremulousness seems like less of an acting sin than overblown wickedness, Gwyneth Paltrow comes off a little better than Lange, but it's obvious she would have never made this movie if she'd been more established. Johnathon Schaech is basically a cipher who gets lost in the shuffle. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide