A Quiet Place is also a drama about parents’ love for their childrenĪnd yet A Quiet Place isn’t just a jumpy thriller. And so we are immersed in their world, with visceral results. The movie toggles from one to the other at times, giving us a sense of how she hears her world.Īll this silence makes the noises more startling, both to the characters and to us. There’s some texture to silence for those of us who can hear for the daughter in A Quiet Place, though, the silence that blankets her life is all-consuming, the silence of a vacuum. The people onscreen are being silent, and we feel like we should be too.īut even silence comes in different varieties. It’s one of the quietest horror films I’ve ever seen, and at my screening, the audience seemed loath to breathe munching popcorn was a glare-worthy offense. We become part of that story too, thanks to sound design that’s conceived to play on the audience’s sense of hearing. Small elements that surfaced earlier in the film come back, like some kind of scavenger hunt, putting family members in danger and extracting them from it. (Most horror films do.) But as the dominoes start to fall, one by one, there’s a cathartic thrill to seeing how carefully they were arranged in the first place. The story unwinds bit by bit, as a number of factors collide on one fateful day that leaves the whole family in peril. Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds in A Quiet Place. But she’s frustrated with the things her younger brother gets to do with her father, and increasingly angered by the future she can see for herself. ![]() Her father works tirelessly to create a hearing aid for her, not just so she can hear but because it could literally save her life. That’s exacerbated by the extra danger facing the daughter, who can’t tell if a noise near her is dangerous. The movie draws us into that silent world very quickly, and every noise and potential noise rapidly becomes fraught with peril. That’s the kind of detail that animates A Quiet Place, in which all sorts of daily tasks are complicated by the imperative to stay absolutely silent: cooking, doing laundry, learning history and math, walking around a creaky old farmhouse. The solution involves a tiny oxygen tank and mask, a soundproofed basement, and a coffin-like crib that muffles any noise. And then the movie jumps ahead by a year, when there’s a new baby on the way.Ī baby! Imagine trying to silence an infant in this world where any sound leads to instant death. The family is at an advantage, having had to learn sign language anyhow to communicate with their daughter, and that might be why they’ve managed to elude the monsters thus far.īut tragedy strikes on the way home from the grocery store one day - a heart-wrenching and terrifying tragedy that leaves its scars on everyone in the family. The story requires them to stay quiet, because virtually any sound draws huge, vicious creatures out of the woods that snatch the offender. John Krasinski and Noah Jupe in A Quiet Place. (Simmonds, who starred as a deaf girl in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck last year, is deaf in real life.) They scavenge through abandoned grocery stores for medications and food and, to keep as silent as possible, walk barefoot through the woods whenever they travel. ![]() One family of survivors is living in a farmhouse in New England: a father ( John Krasinski), a mother ( Emily Blunt), two young sons ( Noah Jupe and Cade Woodward), and a daughter ( Millicent Simmonds), who is deaf. We pick up 89 days into an event that seems to have wiped out most of Earth’s population. The story - from a screenplay co-written by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, and John Krasinski, who also directs and stars - is post-apocalyptic, set in the very near future, around 2020. It does this in a few ways: in the story, in the characters themselves, and in the filmmaking. The best thing A Quiet Place does is foreground our sense of hearing. A Quiet Place uses our sense of hearing to immerse us in a frightening, visceral story Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe in A Quiet Place. The result is frightening, and it feels wholly original. ![]() (Which actually may not sound too out-there to some new parents.)īut people are people, even when they’re being hunted by giant ear monsters - and A Quiet Place taps into that dread, terror, and love. In this case, it’s a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind, apparently extraterrestrial creatures that are triggered into a murderous rage by any sound. In A Quiet Place, that common human experience is parenthood - wanting to protect your children, fearing losing them, and trying to raise them in a hostile world. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |