Featured Creature: The one with a deaf girl and aliens

 

Title: A Quiet Place

What Year?: 2018

Category: Anachronistic Outlier

Classification: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

If you’re a reader who’s been with me for a while, you might easily get the impression that I hardly watch anything new. It’s certainly true that when it comes to what I review, it’s a big deal when I watch something that was made in the last 20 years (see Starship Troopers 3). But I do watch new stuff, even it’s heavy on horror movies and cartoons. There was even a time when I actually reviewed quite a few then-contemporary movies that I greatly admire to this day. With this review, I’m finally back to the present, at least by my standards, with a movie I saw in the theater. Here is A Quiet Place, an actually popular movie that people probably expected me to like.

Our story begins with a family on a supply run in an empty town that ends in a completely predictable tragedy. We soon learn that this is a near-future Earth overrun by mysterious predators that hunt by sound. Our survivors’ advantage is that their teenage daughter is deaf, so they all know sign language. On the other hand, they have another kid on the way, and in the meantime, the father is torturing the deaf girl trying to make a hearing aid. As the due date approaches, the creatures seem to close in. When their home is invaded, it’s up to the family to stop surviving and fight back!

A Quiet Place was a 2018 film by John Krasinski, who starred, directed and received cowriter credit. The story and script was reportedly first developed by writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck as college students, then sold to paramount in 2016. The film costarred Krasinski’s real-life spouse Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf/ hearing-impaired. The soundtrack was composed by Marco Beltrami, also known for Hellboy. The film received a general theatrical release in April 2018 following screenings at the South By Southwest festival. It was an immediate success, earning $350 million against a $17M budget. A sequel was released in 2021 after repeated delays. A possible third film is reportedly in development.

For my experiences, I saw this movie with somewhat cautious interest. My immediate impression was that it provides a typical example of a “mainstream” genre film by people who obviously don’t have a deeper grounding that actual fans would. In particular, it presents a collision of several tropes already thoroughly dissected, notably what I call the “tidy apocalypse” (see Night of the Comet). What’s most noteworthy is the idea of beating a monster by hiding from it. My long-standing take on this is that critics tend to miss the point as much as those who uncritically rely on it. To give the most infamous example, if you’re facing a T. rex, freezing in place is not that bad a plan, for reasons that would apply to any carnivore. At least you aren’t actively advertising that you’re slow and weak, or doing anything to provoke or annoy it. The same applies for any other mumbo jumbo; if a predator doesn’t eat you, the simplest explanation is that you didn’t look or act like food. As I pointed out when I mentioned the present movie in my Green Slime review, a “monster” that doesn’t attack can be terrifying in its own right.

With that in mind, the present movie is actually quite interesting. The monsters are very menacing and damn fast, with a deceptively simple design apart from the weird artichoke heads. They make me think of evil Oz characters, with just enough anthropomorphic qualities to fall in Uncanny Valley territory. On further questions of biology and ecology, what the movie really does right is leaving enough honest unknowns that more common and improbable assumptions of the “monster” genre are unneeded. For example, there’s no serious suggestion that they might be invulnerable to firearms, even if takes a problematically long time for anyone to use one. It’s not difficult to apply further realistic limitations. If they are breeding, it can’t be fast enough for hundreds or thousands of young to be underfoot. While they don’t show communication or pack hunting, there are just enough of them that some social behavior is likely.  Most significantly, their posited strength/ weakness of sound has enough unpredictable effects that it can't easily be taken advantage of. At several unnerving points, they attack machines and other clearly non-edible objects for no reason except irritation. Thus, it is clear that defeating them isn’t just a matter of blasting them with the most powerful sound system you can find, though surely somebody would have tried that at some point.

As often happens, the biggest problems rise from the plot and other mundane considerations. The obvious issues, covered in part above, are where the creatures came from, how they got here and why they weren’t eradicated by military force. For the most part, though, these objections fall under the already expansive category of allowable unknowns. As far as we know, the monsters might not be the only cause or even the main one for the civilizational collapse in evidence. For the purposes of the story, we don’t need to know any more than the human characters do, and it’s clear these aren’t the types who would know that much. What’s far less forgivable is the unnecessary plot contrivances and predictable “mainstream” emotional manipulation. The defining tragedy, considered in cold blood, would probably happen in some form even if the family all followed their own rules to the letter. The resulting guilt and implied conflicts come down in less flattering lights to standard teen angst and self-hatred, while the self-sacrifice of the finale is a lot harder to stomach when the parental figure is literally directing himself. The bottom line to me is that the film and especially the director overplays an already good hand. Monsters versus farmers doesn’t have to be complicated, and where the film that works, it isn’t. The one thing this didn’t need was extra and obvious melodrama.

That brings me to the “one scene”, and I worked in a whole extra viewing to get to the one that’s always interested me the most. In the final act, the mother and her newborn are left behind in a soundproof room. As she wakes up, she discovers that the room is flooding, for reasons I’ve never quite pieced together but seem unrelated to any of the creatures’ depredations. As she looks around, we see a creature on the far side of the chamber, not really doing anything. It makes a kind of rattling or clicking sound, and partly submerges without clearly advancing. Her eyes then fix on a box in use as an improvised cradle, now evidently floating. There’s a low, repeated note in the background as she opens the box and finds the baby safe inside. Just as she retrieves the baby, the creature’s head breaks the surface. And this is one point where my “head canon” take is that the creature knows exactly where the humans are and probably has the whole time. She withdraws, finally retreating behind a sheet of water, while the creature continues its strange sounds that I say fit with actual echolocation. What happens from here is exactly where the interesting part is not what happens but why. Maybe it’s confused or irritated by the noise. Maybe they dislike water. Maybe they are stressed by confined and/or manmade spaces (which would really explain a lot of things we see). Maybe this was never really about hunting for food at all. Like almost all the better aspects of the film, this is a mystery that doesn’t need an answer, though that’s probably not going to stop the sequels from trying.

In closing, the thought that continues to linger in my mind is whether the “monster movie” genre has gone dormant. A major selling point for this movie in particular was to present itself as a willful throwback, with the implication that its own sources belong in the past rather than the present. By my own assessment, the one real low point for monster movies was the 1970s and perhaps the 1960s before that (see Squirm), and that applied more for the American “mainstream” than for genre films as a whole (see Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster). By comparison, the post-2010 era has at least maintained a steady and varied output. There are remakes and belated sequels, of course, the best by a wide margin being Kong. There are “old school” homages like Pacific Rim. There are movies that more properly belong in other genres while having a “monster” vibe, like Lights Out and Frozen. Then there are certainly those here and there that do their own thing within the genre, like Attack The Block and Crawl. In that company, this film was really middle of the road, definitely “retro” in its underpinnings with plenty that’s genuinely new. In the process, it manages to be decent to good, with just a few flaws bringing it down from what could have been a higher rating. All in all, it’s a good prognosis for the future, and that’s enough for me to call it a night.