The Quiet Ones (2014) is Hammer’s Oxford-set possession film, where a professor tries to manufacture a ghost out of a disturbed girl’s mind. Oxford, 1974. Professor Joseph Coupland does not believe in ghosts — he believes in something he finds far more interesting. The phenomena around troubled young Jane Harper, he insists, are not a haunting. They are symptoms. Poltergeists, possessions, every rattling table in history: products of damaged human minds, his included in the diagnosis if not the ward. And if one sufferer’s mind can be made to push its darkness out into the open — into a shape that can be seen, named and destroyed — then Coupland is not just curing Jane. He is curing madness itself. It is a beautiful theory. It requires him to torture a girl to test it.
This was Hammer reaching for its second act. The studio’s revival had just produced the biggest hit in its history, and its follow-up was a period piece about scientists building a ghost in a locked room — sold, inevitably, as “inspired by true events.” The true event is real, stranger than the marketing, and almost nothing like the film. Hold both in your head at once and the picture gets more interesting than its reputation: a Toronto séance circle’s parlour experiment, rebuilt as an Oxford laboratory nightmare, with Jared Harris as the man who is certain there is nothing in the room but the people in it.
Quick Specs
- Director: John Pogue
- Screenplay: Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman and John Pogue, based on a screenplay by Tom de Ville
- Producers: James Gay-Rees and Ben Holden
- Starring: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Olivia Cooke, Erin Richards, Rory Fleck-Byrne
- Cinematography: Mátyás Erdély
- Editor: Glenn Garland
- Music: Lucas Vidal
- Production design: Matthew Gant
- Costume design: Camille Benda
- Studio: Hammer Film Productions, in association with TPSC Films
- Distributor: Lionsgate (UK and US)
- Released: 11 April 2014 (UK); 25 April 2014 (US)
- Runtime: 98 minutes
- Certificate: 15 (UK); PG-13 (US)
- Setting: Oxford, England, 1974
The professor who didn’t believe in ghosts
Coupland opens the film in a lecture theatre, showing his students footage of an earlier case: a boy, David Q, who believed a figure he had drawn — “Mr. Gregor” — made things happen around him. Coupland’s reading is total. There is no Mr. Gregor. There is no ghost. There is a mind under pressure, venting. Jared Harris plays him as the most dangerous kind of rationalist: not a sceptic who doubts, but a believer who has simply chosen the other religion. Every new phenomenon is not a problem for the theory. It is more data.
His assistants are two students, Kristina “Krissi” Dalton (Erin Richards) and Harry Abrams (Rory Fleck-Byrne), and his cameraman is Brian McNeil (Sam Claflin) — hired to film the experiment, not enrolled in it, which matters: Brian is the one person in the house whose job is to watch rather than to believe. The subject is Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), a young woman with no memory of her past and a childhood of foster homes behind her, around whom impossible things keep happening. Coupland’s regimen is stated plainly and it is brutal: Jane is kept locked in a room and blasted with loud rock music through the day so she cannot sleep. The deprivation is deliberate. He means to build her “negative energy” until it can be drawn out of her and destroyed — and the form that energy takes, when it comes, is “Evey”: an infant, doll-like figure that only Jane can see.
The experiment
The university’s College Board, exasperated by the disturbances and the absence of results, cuts Coupland’s funding. A lesser man would stop. Coupland moves the experiment to an isolated house in the countryside and continues in secret — the point where a study becomes an obsession with a postal address. He has Jane try to transfer her negative energy into a doll, so the thing can be destroyed outside her. It does not go gently. The harder the team pushes Jane, the more violent the events become, and harm done to “Evey” appears to land on Jane herself.
Brian, appalled by the methods and growing close to Jane, does the one thing nobody else in the house thinks to do: he investigates. A symbol found marked into Jane’s skin traces back to a cult that worshipped a Sumerian demon. Years earlier, the cult had experimented on a young clairvoyant girl, Evey Dwyer, believing she could bring their idol into the physical world. Everyone in the cult died in a house fire — a fire Evey set. Coupland, presented with an actual demon in his data, does what he always does: he rejects it. Evey must be a construct from Jane’s own buried past. He is closer than he knows, and the film’s cruellest reveal is folded inside his own case files: the boy in his lecture footage, David Q, was Coupland’s own son. (The role is played by two performers — Aldo Maland as the boy in the footage, Max Pirkis as the older David Q.)
Jane Harper is Evey Dwyer
After another attack leaves the whole group marked with the cult’s symbol, Evey kills Krissi and Harry, and Jane finally understands what the audience has been putting together alongside Brian. She is Evey Dwyer. Born clairvoyant, used by a cult, she set the fire that killed them all — and the authorities, giving a traumatised child a chance at a normal life, renamed her Jane Harper. “Evey” is not a demon wearing a girl. She is the girl: her own buried identity and trauma breaking through the amnesia, exactly the kind of thing Coupland’s theory was built to explain, arriving in the one form his theory cannot save her from. Cooke is credited, rightly, as Jane Harper/Evey Dwyer — one role, two names, and the performance has to hold both at once: the patient and the haunting are the same person, and she plays the seam between them as the wound it is.
Coupland’s answer is the film’s bleakest scene. He gives Jane a lethal injection — meaning to stop her heart just long enough for the energy to dissipate. The cure, at last, administered as a small, controlled murder. Brian subdues him and revives her. Jane locks Brian out of the room and sets herself on fire. Months later, a broken Brian insists to an interviewer that everything was captured on film — and is told the films burned with the house. There is nothing on them. He laughs. And his hand begins to smoke, the way Jane’s did.
Toronto, 1972: the ghost they invented on purpose
Now the true event, because it deserves its own room and its own facts. In 1972, in Toronto, Canada, members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research — a lay séance circle, eight participants, among them mathematician A.R.G. Owen and his wife Iris — set out to test a single question: could a group produce paranormal phenomena around a ghost they knew did not exist? They invented one. “Philip Aylesford,” a 17th-century English aristocrat born in 1624: married to a cold wife, Dorothea; in love with a Romani mistress, Margo, who was burned at the stake as a witch; Philip, guilt-ridden, dead by his own hand at thirty. They wrote him a biography. They drew his portrait. None of it was real, and every person at the table knew it.
A first phase of quiet meditation produced nothing. Then the group switched to a livelier séance format — lights down, singing, joking — and the table began to rap and move. “Philip” answered yes-and-no questions with raps, and his answers matched the biography the group had invented for him. Asked about things the group itself did not know, he was vague or historically wrong. Nobody involved claimed Philip was a real spirit; the Owens’ reading was that the phenomena came from the participants’ own minds. Iris Owen and Margaret Sparrow published the experiment in 1976 as Conjuring Up Philip. It is the Philip experiment — one “l,” no final “s” — and almost everything else is the film’s invention: no university, no professor, no patient, no cult, no deaths. What crossed the Atlantic was the premise alone. A group of people, trying on purpose to make a ghost. Coupland’s theory that Jane’s phenomena are products of her own mind is the Philip hypothesis — with Jane in the place of the séance table, and a body count where the raps used to be.
The script that waited, the film that waited longer
The screenplay had a long life before it had a camera. Tom de Ville’s original script featured on the 2007 “Brit List” of the best unproduced British screenplays, and in June 2008 the newly revived Hammer was reported to be developing it. The finished film’s credit is layered, and it is worth printing exactly: screenplay by Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman and John Pogue, based on a screenplay by Tom de Ville. Hammer’s own start-of-production release described the road there — de Ville’s story and original screenplay, revised by Rosenberg, Moverman and, most recently, Pogue, who also directed. That is the whole chain. There is no one else in it.
Harris was announced as Coupland in April 2012 and Claflin as Brian that May; principal photography began on 12 June 2012 and wrapped on 16 July, shooting in Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire, including Merton College and the Bodleian Library in Oxford — the university is named, placed and photographed, whatever later shorthand says. Then the film sat. It was MPAA-rated by April 2013, but Lionsgate acquired the UK and US rights at the Cannes market that May and set the release for 2014: the UK on 11 April, the US on 25 April. A finished Hammer film, in a drawer, for the better part of two years.
After The Woman in Black
Context is the whole story of this film’s reception, so here is the context with its numbers kept honest. The Quiet Ones was Hammer’s next production after The Woman in Black, which the studio’s own releases promoted at over $120 million worldwide — the biggest hit in Hammer history. The follow-up opened in the US at No. 7, taking $3,880,053 on 2,027 screens, and finished its six-week domestic run at $8,509,867 — a figure both major trackers agree on to the dollar. Worldwide is where they part company: Box Office Mojo totals $17,834,867; The Numbers totals $18,413,804. This page prints both because both are what the record says, and no average of the two would be anything but invented. What no honest number can tell you is whether the film lost money: no verified production budget exists, so no profit-or-loss verdict can be computed, and this page does not print one. What is documented is the shape of the landing — a soft opening, a C+ CinemaScore from first audiences, and a contemporary box-office report’s verdict that the film “couldn’t get any traction.”
The critics were colder than the audience. Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus lands the charge the film never shook: “While it definitely sports a few palpable scares, The Quiet Ones finds Hammer Films trading too heavily on past glories.” Stephen Dalton found a film mixing “creaky haunted-house and exorcism tropes” with found-footage nods — “As an exercise in retro pastiche, it impresses. But as a postmodern genre reinvention, it fails to deliver.” Peter Keough gave it one star of four: “The Quiet Ones simply has nothing to say.” Steve Davis gave it one of five, judging the narrative implausibility “either the result of lazy filmmaking or shortcut editing. Either way, you lose.” Scott Tobias, at two and a half of five, found the sharpest cut of all — the film mimics Coupland’s own method: “Throw everything into the beaker, crank up the Bunsen burner, and hope the experiment works. In both cases, it doesn’t.” Metacritic aggregates 41 from 24 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes stood at 37% from 83 reviews, as cited in 2020; the score has moved since release, which is itself a small lesson in how these numbers behave.
The glories in question
That consensus phrase — past glories — deserves a footnote, because the glories have names. The revived Hammer was always going to be measured against the studio of Terence Fisher, of The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula, and against its own comeback hit standing immediately in front of this film in the queue. The Quiet Ones loses both comparisons and was probably built to. It is a smaller, meaner, more doubtful film than either: a ghost story whose ghost is a diagnosis, whose villain is a theory, and whose most frightening idea is that Coupland might be right — that the thing in the room with Jane Harper was never anything but Jane Harper, and that knowing it saved nobody. Watch it for Harris, smiling gently while he ruins a girl’s life in the name of curing her. Watch it for Cooke, holding the film’s whole trick in one face. And watch it knowing that in Toronto in 1972, eight people sat around a table and tried to invent a ghost — and that the table, eventually, answered. The film just asked what would happen if the ghost answered back with a grudge. The answer is not Hammer’s happiest hour. It might be its most honest one.