Let’s start with the good news. I enjoyed this movie. It gripped me, made me hold my breathe at times and sometimes it rather moved me.
A Quiet Place stars Emily Blunt, and I have enjoyed every one of the movies I have seen her in from The Devil Wears Prada and Wild Target to Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Sicario and The Girl on the Train. I have seen ten of her movies and here she is as good as I expect. This movie also stars her husband, John Krasinski, best known in America for his TV role in their version of The Office and other, mainly comic, parts. As Blunt and Krasinski play husband and wife their natural chemistry transfers to the screen.
We have a small cast playing a Mother, a Father and their children. The 13 year old British actor Noah Jupe plays one of the children and Millicent Simmons their daughter. By some coincidence Millicent was in the 2013 movie Wonderstruck, and Noah was in Wonder released in the same year. These young actors are both utterly convincing.
Some of you may know that Millicent is severely deaf, and her character here is also deaf, so the fictional family all use American Sign Language. That is very helpful because the whole family has to keep very very quiet 24/7 for their own safety. If they make a noise they are very likely to die.
The film was shot by the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, whose work I enjoyed in Far from the Madding Crowd,and Girl on a Train, also starring Emily Blunt. John Krasinski directed the film effectively and with economy. There is no flab or spare flesh on this movie. So there is a lot of good news here. Mot film critics praise it highly.
However – and I guess you knew there was a ‘however’ coming - Krasinski is also a co-scriptwriter, along with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, and here the movie falls down. It is not the characterization, which is engaging and persuasive, nor the pacing, which is taut and builds pretty well. But the narrative is full of holes.
I find it interesting that most critics describe this as a horror movie. I wish it was, because you can get away with so much more narrative silliness in horror. Logic is not essential in a genre that does not need to be rational. The super-natural and does not need to make logical sense as long as it frighten us. But this is not horror. This is Science Fiction (sf) and that genre has to make sense.
Why is it science fiction? Because the premise is that the world has been taken over by huge deadly insect-like creatures (presumably aliens, thought this is never made explicit) and it proceed along the thread of ‘we have a life threatening problem, how can we survive?’ ‘Oh, yes, this is how’. The monsters here are presented as real not supernatural, so we need some context to make sense of their existence. The script provides us with lazy devices to describe their arrival on Earth and its devastating effect, but does nothing to explain why humankind is so vulnerable to them. In fact it explicitly raises the question, what is their weakness? and the answer is clear to for us all to see, but not, it seems, clear to any of the world’s scientists or military. If the monsters were super-natural beings they would not have to conform to reality because they were super-natural. But if the monsters are alien they are part of a science fiction universe that demands internal consistency in a context of hard or soft science.
So this is a bad science fiction story dressed up as a horror story, underlined by the way familiar ‘horror’ story tricks are played on us one after another. I do get rather annoyed when people simply assume that they can write sf as if it is just another narrative devise. It is not. It is a genre and genres have rules. That is what defines them.
And then there are other specific plot weaknesses. In A Quiet Place the husband and wife are obviously clever – they are among the few human survivors because they have worked out how to stay alive despite the deadly aliens - but they do very stupid things. I will not spoil the plot by saying what they are but they shout out at us, in fact the narrative is driven by them. The most stupid thing the couple do is central to the plot. And when they eventually find the answer to defeating the aliens it has been signaled to us long before. How is it that no one else has worked out something so simple long before the story started? The answer, of course, is that if they had we could not have this story to tell, but that is never justification for writing a bad plot. Good sf does not rest on the premise that everyone is in the world is stupid apart from the few otherwise ordinary people who inhabit the story.
I think there may be two reasons why the script writers got away with this genre confusion and plot silliness. The first is that was co-written and wholly directed by the man who plays the star’s real husband, John Krasinski, so maybe his wife, Emily Blunt, did not have enough critical distance to help her real world husband by pointing out the plot’s problems. And he had written her a juicy role, after all.
The second is that it is produced by Michael Bay. Now I have nothing bad to say about any of Bay’s films, because I have never seen any of them. Not seeing them has been my informed choice. I do however think that the Transformer movies were monster movies rather than sf, even if the monsters were dressed up as Robots, so maybe he doesn’t know the rules of real sf either. And who made the really bad decision to provide a soundtrack to this movie? A film that is about people being very very quiet in order to survive, and that starts with a long opening sequence that is stunning because it is soundless, does not need a musical score. It seems that some one did not trust the movie’s central idea, and I suspect that was Mr. Bay. There is nothing wrong with the music itself, it is exactly what you would expect in a horror movie (remembering that this is not really a horror movie) but I would love to see it with nothing but natural sound – the natural sounds that can bring very sudden death to any of the characters.
So I enjoyed watching A Quiet Place,even if at times I almost burst out laughing at scenes that were meant to thrill me. Laughing because they were simply stupid. At other times I was moved by it, and I certainly enjoyed the acting, direction and photography. So a mixed bag, and for me a rather disappointing one.
