I’d like you to close your eyes and imagine, for a second, a beautiful, sustainable idyllic America.
Think of mighty trees encasing a small valley, permanently just off the beaten track but always approachable. A harmony of nature and community that feels oddly visually specific to places like Virginia, maybe. The dirt tracks that connect the farmstead snake between the orderly rows of corn that you can run your hands through on a summers’ day; the softly groaning silos speak of a strong harvest and gentle winds in the green valley; the autumn-red family house - humble, but wildly larger than anything you are ever going to live in - is filled with soft Americana that evokes a simpler time through handmade textiles and stacks of glass jars housing home-made pickles.
Mother is busy doing washing, her belly swelling with life, and your twenty other children cavort and play in what can only be described as a paradise on earth. Your paradise. You made it. You deserve it - and you built this all with hard work, sweat, and the money you embezzled from Dunder-Mifflin.
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| No shit this might actually be where they shot the opening. |
So - in A Quiet Place, Office Jim, Emily Blunt, and their three children live in a world where they cannot make noise (and, while this is not the ‘fetish’ part of the film, cannot wear shoes! The camera really focuses on a lack of footwear in the first twenty minutes to a large extent, again - purity, returning to old values, returning to innocence etc.). They struggle to find medicine in an old-fashioned general store festooned with papyrus-font adverts located in a deserted town. What’s happened here, why is the place so quiet, why is no one wearing any shoes ever, all these questions and more interrupted by the sudden death of one of their children whose loud spaceship toy - large double-A batteries freshly reinstalled - calls forth a beast from the forest that promptly kills him.
From here we are transported to life on the farm with Jim, Emily (who is revealed to be pregnant with a fourth child), and the kids. We watch them go through their daily quiet routines and enjoy their daily quiet lives as best as they can with the restrictions imposed upon them by the threat of these creatures that are attracted to noise, hijinks ensue, film ends.
This is undeniably a film written exclusively from the perspective of The Guys. Everything falls neatly in place to suit both the character and a fantasy of a universal Dad-ness: you’re telling me the world has changed and we can no longer communicate our feelings out loud? Oh man, and I have to be a hunter-gatherer as my wife mends clothes and cooks? And I can sacrifice myself for my children in a brave, selfless act that just about makes up for me being emotionally distant and unwilling to find other ways to communicate? Under the gaze of the great Camera Dad our characters are stripped of internality, their decisions and processes almost always guided by a belief in The Dad as his beard grows longer and his shoulders show no sign of wavering under the Dad Burden that he carries.
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| People have clowned on this, but this is exactly how/what I write when I'm pretending to work. |
In A Quiet Place the American idyll setting lacks tension because it never means anything, it’s just a never-ending series of landscape paintings in a Dr.s office or on a racist twitter account. They can eat food here, they can fish here, they can walk through the forest here (barefoot), they can build things here, they can rig a light system here, they can farm here. They make crafts, they hand-sew mobiles, they make a soundproof cot, they have beds and boardgames, gaslamps, old cars, guns. It is an intolerably dull, comfortable place they live and within that place the monsters, the silence, is presented as an obstacle to live alongside and occasionally interact with.
The creatures are an existential threat, a force that removes the human voice, children’s laughter, cries of pain etc. but it never lands - the setting working hard to keep the threat of the monsters at bay, reducing them to random provenance. The world building is a huge issue here, again, too much time was clearly spent constructing the big RETVRN fetish farm of the 50s and not enough time was spent thinking about how that could possibly interact with the horror premise they created. No shoes is the rule, sure, that makes enough sense, but what about ambient noise? The noise of the characters walking up a ladder, of them sitting on a bed, splashing water, collecting food, cooking food, lighting fires - my partner chimed in with this while I was describing it to her, but what if you poop? Can you poop quietly enough? What if you fart? What about rain?
Of course on a perfect farmstead there is no rain - there can’t be; there’s never any rain in the paintings on the office walls - but is rain a massive threat or a soothing balm? Is rain the great equaliser? When it rains are there places you can’t go (say, massive, echoing metal silos) and places you can go and have a chat?
The question the film continuously fails to ask is ‘how did our characters adapt (and the corollary - what does look like now that we’ve adapted)’, instead creating arbitrary rules and exceptions that creates the impression that the monsters are always just far enough away for us not to need to care about them, politely waiting until they need to show up for impact.
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| This 97 year old farm still makes dirt the traditional way. |
This is the core of the issue I have with the film - the family isn’t trapped; they’re insulated, the horror around them that has brought down the rest of society just doesn’t quite interact with their farm or their lives. Their perfect snapshot of traditional America acts as a way to keep them alive, uncorrupted by the trials of the rest of the world, preserved like so many vegetables in so many jars. By the time the tension ratchets up and the creatures are visibly stalking around it is rendered boring and toothless because we understand thematically how little they mean to the outcome.
They are not being hunted, they are not prey. They are immune and protected, and they’re about to welcome another child into the quiet hellworld, congratulations to the happy couple.
The farmstead life is never challenged, it never acts as a challenge, their lives aren’t changed, and their circumstances aren’t altered in any way that is morally or philosophically significant. It wants us to focus on the idea of family, but why do we care when the family is (losing a kid aside, again not thaaaaat impactful in the film) perfectly fine. A Quiet Place is a truly ineffectual film in a uniquely American way, surrounding its characters with a boring, traditionalist wet-dream and then asking us to feel sorry for them without really working to win our sympathies. This is not a film to frighten or confront - it is a reassurance that if you are living the right way (praying, putting up dopey decorations, letting Mom do all the work while you fuck around on a radio) then there are no circumstances that you cannot prosper in.
TL;DR
Dull, bad movie; some phenomenal sound mixing; some really good unintentionally funny mis en scene like the massive garlic (famously loud vegetable to prepare!) that hangs behind Emily Blunt and like the Dad’s entire office/workshop; too much feet; too much time was spent recreating a gag from Home Alone; I went further on the sustainable farmhouse fetishistic stuff but it was getting too long and too boring because I was too annoyed at it; we’re not even gonna talk about the deaf girl character here - I think they really did that character a disservice; should’ve called it The Quiet Life so they could use the song from the band Japan.
3/10, go watch literally anything else. Official frog rating.
Did I intend to get this and like 5 other things out around Halloween? Absolutely. Did I succeed? No lmfao.
