Unrequited love can be utterly wretched. And it’s one of those rotten things that nearly all of us have in common, because hopeless crushes can strike anyone at any time. Most of us just cope with it one way or another — we mope around the house for a while, try to avoid the object of our affections until things are less fraught, or simply drown our sorrows in ice cream. It’s no fun and we can be pretty miserable for a while, but we get through it because we have to. Unfortunately, once in a while unrequited love can turn into obsession, as happens in the short film Hush, and at that point all bets are off.
Jeremy (Anthony Scanish), you see, is so madly in love with Suzanna (Melissa Damas) that he imagines them together constantly. Her husband Mark (Erik Searle) naturally doesn’t enter into these fantasies in the slightest, just as Jeremy’s wife Betty (Kristin Anne Teporelli) doesn’t matter anymore, either. Complicating the situation is the fact that all four are friends, often visiting with each other and another couple. So Jeremy avoiding Suzanna until his emotions settle down isn’t really an option, but as it is things are increasingly stressful between Jeremy and Betty, who knows something is very wrong but isn’t sure exactly what’s happened.
Jeremy doesn’t seem to want to get over his obsession anyway, instead letting it pull him deeper into his ever more dangerous fantasy world. And when the situation finally reaches a crisis, it will do so in a way that no one is expecting, probably not even Jeremy.
It’s an all too familiar story, told here with sparse, quiet tension. There’s no dialogue, but there doesn’t need to be, the story unfolding bit by bit through the fascinating imagery of Jeremy’s daydreams and his life, the latter dull and colorless compared to the thrilling, vivid scenes of his imagination. It isn’t hard to understand why he’s so anxious to make dreams into reality, except all his wife and friends see is him losing his grip on reality. The ending is both shocking and inevitable, though unfortunately not entirely surprising. It’s an alarmingly realistic look at the results of one person’s obsession, with powerful images that you won’t be able to look away from.