Last year, Get Out proved just how brainy a horror movie could be, and I feel like it's helped kick-start something of a horror revival - not the kind of self-aware we got with Scream back in the nineties, the kind that turns into a bit of smarmy and sneery and self-indulgent after a while, but viscerally psychological and supremely timely. 10 Cloverfield Lane was another such great horror movie, released a little over two years ago just like Get Out was released a little over one year ago. Is there some kind of annual clockwork going on? We'll just have to wait and see.
This year, A Quiet Place continues what I'm hoping is a good strong horror revival trend. It ain't perfect - it's got a fair few flaws, and I'm not just talking about how, when confronted with the initial premise, you'll immediately realize that silence, though golden, is damn near impossible to achieve biologically for any human. But for those fair few flaws, it's still very chilling, and beautifully conceived on so many levels, especially acting and writing.
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| Pictured: Ms. Blunt acting through what has to be the most nightmarish scene in the whole damn movie. |
The casting is where A Quiet Place shines the most. It's a minimalist cast, with only seven live humans showing up on screen at any time - up to five of which at any time are the family on which the story centers. One of the Abbott family, I'm sorry to say, dies at the end of the movie's prologue - the youngest son, Beau, who turns on a Space Shuttle toy, and the noise attracts the wicked fast, wicked carnivorous aliens who've taken over the world in this deadly near future. More on Beau later, though. (Bear in mind that none of the family's names are ever revealed throughout the movie - I'm consulting IMDb and Wikipedia for this info.) For the rest of the family, we have parents Lee and Evelyn, played by real-life couple John Krasinski (also director and co-writer and producer) and Emily Blunt (from The Adjustment Bureau and Edge of Tomorrow), and their surviving kids Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Millicent Simmonds, who's deaf and plays a deaf character - thumbs up for disabled rep!) Having a deaf child gives the family one significant advantage when attempting to survive this post-apocalypse - they're all fluent in ASL and can adapt to make that their first language. The hearing family members, though, tend to noticeably subvocalize as they sign, but they can really only talk when they're near a natural noise source, like the river where Lee and Marcus go at one point to check on their fishing traps.
Of course, what happens when another natural noise source comes into their world? In the form of the baby Evelyn's carrying now, about a year after Beau's death in the prologue. Like, the second you see her caressing her baby bump - and the calendar showing that she's due at the end of the month, only two or three weeks away - you know they're all in for a world of hurt.
It makes sense that there's a lot of paranoid adult fear in this movie - to hear Krasinski tell it, a lot of inspiration for the script came from his and Blunt's parenting anxieties. Still, though, with Beau's death right at the start, and then a long, long, LONG string of alien attacks in the movie's second half, you start to wonder if perhaps this movie comes from the same school of thought as Frank Darabont or Scott Gimple. Like, honestly, I bet Darabont gets a lot of what Vinnie on Alice @ 97.3 would call "inspiration" from the end of the prologue, because between The Blob, The Mist, and The Walking Dead Season 2, Darabont's well-established in my mind as a serial killer of fictional children. And hell, as the alien attacks keep on coming and you start to wonder who's gonna bite the dust, the whole thing starts to feel extremely bleak after a while.
Without getting too spoilery, I can tell you this much: thank God they didn't emulate the ending of The Mist. If they had, and I'd been foolish enough to bring food into this movie, I would've thrown my drink at the screen. (If you don't know, I absolutely HATE The Mist just because of that ending. It's the most bloodydamn horrible ending I've ever seen.)
But they didn't. So, again, thank God.
Perhaps there's also a little to be said about the movie making a little too much use of minimalism too. Nothing against there being such a small handful of credited human actors, or a dearth of dialogue as demanded by the premise (hell, even the ASL dialogue feels like there's not a great deal of it.) But there's a lot of potential backstory just waiting to be explored, and you almost feel like Krasinski's drawing on his comedic background and trolling us viewers, holding out backstory on a fishing line and yanking it away the second we reach for it. Like, Lee lights up a signal flame in one early scene, and the camera pans around the view he sees of the woods all around him, and there's numerous other flames popping up in the distance. Other families of survivors? If so, why do the Abbotts make no effort to meet or connect with them? Why only keep trying, by radio and Morse code, to reach major world cities that have all gone dark for the last year-plus?
But I digress.
Really, while the movie does have its problems that are only too easy to poke a hole in, those writing shortfalls are more than made up for by the strengths of the acting and directing, especially the effective weaponization of sound - or, more often, the lack thereof. For this reason, A Quiet Place earns a B+ from me.
Till next time, Pinecones...
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| #FeedTheRightWolf |
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| Remember: Denis Leary is always watching. Always. |
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