Jared Harris – who played sticky-fingered ad boss Lane Pryce in ‘Mad Men’ – is the strongest thing about this Brit horror, which the filmmakers claim is based on real events. Believe that if you like, but Harris is terrific as an Oxford professor who plays God, plucking a teenage girl with psychiatric problems (Olivia Cooke) from an asylum. The plan is to test his so-crazy-it-might-be-genius theory that ghosts are the products of troubled minds. If he’s right, it could mean a cure for mental illness. (Or something like that; the background stuff is fussy and hard to follow.) Trouble is, the girl goes all ‘The Exorcist’ on him. Sam Claflin (one of Jennifer Lawrence’s token love interests in ‘The Hunger Games’) is hired to film the experiment.
There are a couple of decent jumps and a few giggles, but nothing armrest-clenchingly scary about ‘The Quiet Ones’. This latest effort from a revived Hammer Films just isn’t creepy enough to get under the skin.