Critic Reviews

Aside from a few cheap but effective shocks and jumps, there's nothing here that horror fans haven't seen in better recent films like "The Conjuring." Not to mention all of those wonderful Hammer films from the '50s and '60s.

Worth making a little noise about if you’re a horror fan.

While the movie is not without its charms, there's nothing indicating that it's actually a Hammer movie.

If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.

If you look at a horror movie’s prime directive to be to scare the viewer, there’s no denying that, at times, The Quiet Ones got me.

Messier than recent Hammer output, but effectively chilling when it’s not making us feel the noize.

There’s creepy dolls, cameras tipped on their side, blasts of white noise and a horny teenage Scooby gang helping Jared Harris’ Oxford prof stir up a poltergeist in the mind of a moody emo girl (Olivia Cooke).

The arrestingly fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.

all the retro production design in the world can’t disguise the sheer familiarity of the film’s paranormal parlor tricks.

The 1970s setting offers a retro feel that should strike appealing chords for fans of old-school horror, but there’s little here that’s exactly new or fresh.