Silence can speak volumes
In the age of Netflix, and at an age when, increasingly, anything that starts after 9pm seems late to me, I tend to avoid the cinema. Also – and this is truly terrible – I don’t like being separated from my phone for more than 90 minutes, unless I am going to be asleep. If a social media storm breaks on Twitter and you’re not there to see it, did it really happen?
My sister told me that I had to break my cinema stance to see a film called A Quiet Place. Set in the near future, it stars Emily Blunt and John Krasinski as parents trying to keep their family alive in a world that has been invaded by monsters who hunt by sound.
So far, so sci-fi. But this movie is also a moving and meditative piece on what it means to be quiet.
There is barely any talking in the film; just music, birdsong and the peculiar noises of the creatures as they stalk their prey. It’s truly frightening: it forces you to think about how utterly reliant we are on background noise, how allergic we are to keeping our gobs shut.
In the modern world, it seems there is nothing peaceful about being quiet. I left vowing to go to the cinema more often. How funny that nowadays we must pay £11.99 for the privilege of sitting in silence.