Can I pause for a moment here to reflect on how weird movies theaters are? The picture is clear and crisp, not washed out by the glow of a couple cars. You cannot see several other showings of Saw prequels or anniversary showings of Shrek in your periphery the entire time you’re watching. The quality of your car radio and car battery have little to no influence on your enjoyment of the sound. You also cannot shout at the top of your lungs with your Friend while Bruce Lee womanizes in a volcano base. There are rules of propriety. This movie is probably also not the best movie to be your first one back to the theaters, just in terms of your sensitivity to noise and coughing especially.
I thought maybe that I had written about A Quiet Place previously here, but I think it flirted with the very beginnings of the blog in April of 2018. AQP tapped into the zeitgeist of movies that tried to tell stories using different language: ASL features prominently in the Best Picture of the previous year, Shape of Water (2017), and many indie movies and blockbusters alike had tried to use speechlessness (a favorite topic of mine) to encapsulate the lack of emotional language that comes with being a child, as in Wall-E (2008, taking direction from the era of silent film), the experiment no one saw or should see The Good Dinosaur (2015), or Studio Ghibli’s strange in a boring way The Red Turtle (2016). Room (2015) also adapted some of the sad and beautiful elements of language geared toward children in trauma. AQP also fell into a genre of movies that featured rugged outdoorsmen trying their best to live through the post-apocalypse in the woods, as in The Survivalist (2015), which came out the same year as The Revenant, and It Comes at Night (2017).
If memory serves, AQP Part I had as much to do with survivalism as it did with living up to the high expectations of your father and a young teen’s rejection of her mother. It was an aggressively feelsy movie, one that wrapped the anxieties of childbirth and early parenting in the guise of an unsettling story about a world-ending silence that forced people to adapt their immutable nature. The parallels to quarantine are flexible enough to come through in the early shots of Part II. Murphy and Hounsou both meditate on the ethical quandaries of human selfishness and the true nature of man at various points in the film, as if the events themselves are only as traumatic as the things they revealed about their friends and neighbors. I like when AQP is more Predator meets Home Alone, meticulous trap-setters trying to outsmart an unkillable enemy. I’m less interested in the nostalgic shots of compasses, crosses, and portraits that swell the score and signal emotion.
Part I had stakes and made it clear that no one had plot armor, no matter how innocent or famous. The loss of people who feel integral to the family unit is what made the whole movie feel like a high-wire act that you were witnessing with no assurance that the survivors would emerge from the other end of act two all right. Part II does away with all pretense. You are here because you like ASL or Emily Blunt or the emergently badass Millicent Simmonds or maybe you’re here because you and your mom went and saw Red Eye in 2005 when you thought you were gonna see Flight Plan (also 2005??) and maybe you had already seen Red Eye the previous week with your dad but you didn’t want to mention it because you weren’t really sure what you were watching.
Anyway, the point is Cillian Murphy is in this movie and he doesn’t have a super big role. He gives off some vibes that me might become the romantic lead of the movie, but at the same time, it feels a little Biblical, like the brother is marrying his brother’s widow to keep things in the family, a little?
Most, if not all, of the best scenes are the trailer and there are no major innovations on storytelling or scenarios. To make things scary, the director literally drapes a lei of bells around your neck or creeps the camera around a corner for you to stare at its “peelable face” (as Friend put it afterwards, having only read the Wikipedia entry for AQP Part I). Actually, without the luxury of prior acquaintance with the series, Friend had a lot of questions about the lack of free flowing information about how to 1) kill the monsters in a myriad of ways or 2) seek shelter from them. Not giving away too much by saying that the film suffers from a few paradoxes. The first is the gracefulness paradox. The monsters are generally scary strong and reckless, because having them jump onto the backs of trucks or literally burst through trains is cool, but they also seem to be dainty little spindly debutantes when the plot needs them not to knock over any delicate equipment. Similarly, there are dueling takes on the redemption of humans in this movie and the optimistic take does not win out. Despite the fact that Cillian Murphy is selfless to a fault, most of the people around him are either indescribably creepy and evil or they’re innocent and defenseless to the point of incredulity.
One out of five Babadooks.
