Alistair Harkness reviews A Quiet Place
Despite an unrealistic premise of a post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt by sound, the strong cast of A Quiet Place makes the human drama relatable while silence is cleverly exploited to amplify terror
It’s a great example of a mainstream horror film using the self-imposed limitations of its story to its advantage
Apost-apocalyptic creature feature in which the monsters hunt by sound, A Quiet Place exploits its ingeniously simple premise by using silence to amplify terror at a time when too many horror films coast by on clanging jump-scares. Co-written, directed by and starring The American Office alumnus John Krasinski, the film sets out its stall in a savage opening that shows just what’s at stake for protagonists the Abbot family 89 days into this desolate new world. As Lee (Krasinski), his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and their children – including their deaf daughter Reagan (played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds) – scavenge for supplies, the film displays all kinds of formal invention to ratchet up the tension, including cutting subtly between Reagan’s perspective and that of her hearing siblings and parents who are more attuned to the fact that the slightest noise will bring about the monsters that have wiped out much of civilisation. Jumping forward almost a year, we rejoin them as survivors hardened by grief, but also somewhat distanced from one another: their need to communicate mostly in sign language has taken a toll and the baby the now heavily pregnant Evelyn is carrying is also becoming an ever more imminent threat to their future survival. What follows is a great example of a mainstream horror film using the self-imposed limitations of its story to its advantage while a great cast makes the human drama relatable. Krasinski is good as the father suddenly reckoning with his need to protect his family in a very real and immediate way, but it’s Blunt and Simmonds who steal the show.
Coincidentally, Simmonds is also great as the star of Wonderstruck, Todd Haynes’s affectionately oddball kids’ film about a pair of deaf kids running wild in New York 50 years apart. Based on the part prose/part picture-book novel by Brian Selznick, it’s an unsentimental ode to both childhood and cinema thanks to a structure that blends a 1920s-set silent film (starring Simmonds as a deaf child who runs away to New York to track down her silent-filmstar mother) with a 1970s-set comingof-age movie about an orphaned, newly deaf kid (Oakes Fegley) who runs away to the Big Apple to find out about the father he never knew. Haynes regular Julianne Moore co-stars, but it’s Haynes’s own ability to present a kid’s eye view of New York with all its dark fairy tale allure that makes this stand out.
Haynes, of course, got his start as a pioneer of the New Queer cinema movement of the early 1990s and his early groundbreaking work laid the foundations for where we are today: a place where an explicit Canneswinning arthouse movie about the French branch of the AIDS activism movement Act Up can co-exist with a sweet, funny, multiplex-friendly gaythemed coming-of-age film without either feeling like a niche release. With regards to the former, Robin Campillo’s semi-autobiographical
120 BPM is a brilliant dramatisation of Act Up’s brash and urgent efforts to raise awareness of the AIDS crisis in Paris in the 1990s. Zeroing in on the limbo-like existence of French youth at a time when the government was burying its head in the sand, the film serves up a no-nonsense portrayal of what it means to be true to yourself when the world appears to be turning its back on your future. By contrast, the dilemmas facing the titular protagonist of Love, Simon seem pretty insignificant given that they mostly revolve around rising star Nick Robinson’s well-adjusted high school student trying to figure out which closeted gay kid in his class might be the person he’s falling for online. But that’s also a sign of progress: it’s fun to see an American teen movie that doesn’t treat gay sexuality as either a tragedy or something devoid of hormonal lust.
With high school students leading the charge against gun violence in America, a remake of the old Charles Branson vigilante movie Death Wish seems especially poorly timed, not least because the solution it offers to the problem is for mild-mannered middle-aged white guys to take up arms against random street thugs. Directed by Eli Roth and starring Bruce Willis as a trauma surgeon pushed over the edge when a burglary gone wrong leaves his wife dead and his daughter in a coma, the film occasionally displays a selfaware ability to flirt with the idea of interrogating the vigilante genre, but mostly it’s content to stick to its regressive caveman thesis.
There’s a distinct money-for-old-rope feel about Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s decision to adapt their much-hyped 2010 stage play
Ghost Stories for the big screen. A tribute of sorts to the old Amicus British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s, this supernatural portmanteau about a paranormal investigator (Nyman) who takes on three cases that stumped his missing-presumed--
dead inspiration is not scary at all. Despite a supporting cast with fine comic instincts (among them Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse and The End of the F***ing World’s Alex Lawther), it’s hokey rather than jokey and while it’d be churlish to reveal which Irvine Welsh novel a version of its big twist ending previously appeared in (or which superior Iain Banks book Welsh nabbed it from), its arrival here is a bit of non-event, albeit one that justifies some of the glaring logic gaps elsewhere. ■