A Hammer horror that isn’t scary? Shocking!

SINCE Hammer Films rose from the dead in 2008 they have made some commendably fine horror features, including 2012’s The Woman In Black, which deserved criticism only for its 12A certificate.

The Quiet Ones is properly a 15, but it is hackneyed stuff and nothing to get fans of the genre jumping in their seats. It opens with a caption explaining that the film is based on actual events, a somewhat disingenuous claim since those ‘ actual events’ include furious poltergeists.

Nevertheless, it is true that the story is broadly factual, in that it revolves around serious university research in the Seventies into socalled parapsychology.

The Quiet Ones is set in 1974, with Slade repeatedly blaring out so as not to let us forget. Jared Harris plays an Oxford professor who conducts a series of experiments on a disturbed young woman (Olivia Cooke, pictured), keeping her locked up while trying to understand whether her emotional torment has given her paranormal powers, or indeed vice versa.

Cooke is terrific, and so is Harris, who came to a memorably sticky end as Lane Pryce in Mad Men and seems destined for one here, too. too. It is a Norwegian conspiracy thriller set in the Eighties, when, with the North Sea oil boom promising huge dividends, the U.S. and Norway competed for a lucrative contract to build a pipeline on the sea bed.

The race required divers to plunge deeper than anyone had before, and that’s where this thriller takes us. One diver, Petter ( Aksel Hennie), narrowly escapes death i n an accident that kills his brother, and then resolves to f i nd out who is responsible. It is an interesting enough premise, and I kept feeling that I should have been more gripped than I was, but hard as I scrutinised t he s ub - titles, I j ust couldn’t work out what was going on. Perhaps the English language remake will make things clearer: George Clooney has snapped up the rights.