Silence speaks volumes
Harking back to day one of A Quiet Place in Michael Sarnoski's sophomore feature
I can still recall the sound of silence ringing clear as a bell on a crisp winter’s morn when we huddled in a preternaturally hushed cinema auditorium watching director John Krasinski’s 2018 spooker, A Quiet Place.
Co-written with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, it neatly deployed John Wyndham’s remarkable trick in The Day of the Triffids, thrusting us headlong into an apocalypse in medias res and only lightly scattering clues as to how it all happened. All we knew was that monstrous aliens – basically one big ear on legs – had overrun the world. One year in, we follow the desperately muffled struggle for one family’s survival.
As depicted by Krasinski and his real-life partner Emily Blunt, playing Lee and Evelyn Abbot, they had to navigate this nightmarish new normal in an otherwise idyllic American town surrounded by (admittedly crinkly) forests, all while keeping their three kids – Wonderstuck star and deaf actor Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe and Cade Woodward – alive.
A simple set-up, but with abundant terror built into the bones, it was one of the most efficiently frightening films of recent years with what felt like real stakes: enough to forgo a handful of popcorn, lest one be catapulted through the screen and into the many-mouthed fangs of these eyeless horrors. And if Blunt gets to go all Ripley while pregnant, all the better.
Manhattan’s scream
With Krasinski’s lockdown-disrupted and semi-photocopied sequel’s half-arsed attempt to flesh out the world feeling both underdone and overcooked at the same time, it’s fair to say I went into the prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One, with muted expectations.
I needn’t have worried. Now guided by writer/director Michael Sarnoski – who gleefully wrongfooted us with his debut, 2021 gem Pig, Nic Cage’s quietest turn in quite some time– the series delivers its best yet by throwing out the rule book and going BIGGER, without ever losing sight of its human heart a la James Cameron’s sublime sci-fi sequel, Aliens.
Turns out the Abbots had it good in small-town America. If you happened to be stuck on Manhattan Island when the meteorites bearing the big-eared meanies crashed into its world-famous skyline, you were already at a massive disadvantage. And that’s even before the US Government decided to cut your losses and blew every bridge out of there, a cruel twist left to the monster itself in Cloverfield.
We’re told in an opening intertitle that New York, on an average day, rumbles along at a collective 90 decibels, essentially a never-ending scream. Not the ideal place, then, to hide away from alien invaders in an end of days approved by particularly tetchy librarians.
Survival as a goal is also upended by our window into this undoing, with luminous Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o playing Sam, a grieving poet and understandably cranky cancer patient who’s already residing in palliative care. Convinced to go on a theatre trip by Pig star Alex Wolff’s nurse, Reuben, she reluctantly agrees, only to be miffed when she discovers it’s a puppet show. Still, the theatre’s a decent enough place to hide when mayhem erupts.
Frodo to the rescue
A blown-to-bits bus sequence, with shadows of ashen-faced 9/11 footage, kicks off her Odyssean quest not to get off the island, but instead to have one last slice of pizza from the joint she and her late jazz-playing father used to go to together. This quiet determination to keep control of her final hours lends the film a beautiful melancholy.
Sam’s not best pleased with Stranger Things actor Joseph Quinn’s shellshocked English law student Eric, attaching himself to her despite this most likely suicidal mission, but their tentative friendship is quite gorgeous to behold as they steal whispers in the rain and let loose full-throated scream in a storm of thunder and lightning.
As with Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie, a great deal of character development is parcelled out in the briefest moments, making us actually care for these wandering souls. However, both are upstaged by Frodo. No, not The Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood, but Schnitzel and Nico, the moggies who share the scene-stealing role of Sam’s Hobbit-named emotional support cat.
Is it slightly ridiculous that this working cat can wind his way through the crashing-down disaster that is a city torn asunder by people-eating beasts that can climb skyscraper faces?
Sure, as is Eric mostly keeping on his good office shoes and tie. So is pizza time in Armageddon (or maybe not, actually). But scary movies thrive on folks doing silly things. It’s what makes us eat our nails and swallow our screams behind splayed fingers. Sarnoski’s curveball of a sore-hearted sophomore feature soars because we want to believe.
So shhhhhhhhh. Sit back and enjoy the show.
A Quiet Place: Day One is in Australian cinemas now.
Also check out my chat with Hunt for the Wilderpeople star Rachel House about her gorgeous directorial feature debut, The Mountain.
Elsewhere:
Over at SBS you can read my chat with Russell Tovey and the directors of The Fortress.
Sticking with SBS, you can also check out my highlights from their nail-biting thrillers movie collection, and I chatted to The Castle star Stephen Curry about his scandal-filled episode of Who Do You Think You Are.
Over at ScreenHub, you can read my review of Timothy Despina Marshall’s spooky horror movie In the Room Where He Waits, starring Daniel Monks.
I took a look at Oscar-nominated director Irene Taylor’s gut-punch of a music documentary, I Am: Céline Dion, for Flicks.
Read my chat with MIFF film Suspended Time director Olivier Assayas at The Saturday Paper.
Here’s a chat with playwright and Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell alum Francis Greenslade about his debut play, The Platypus, on at Theatre Works until July 6.