Kowloon Genetic Romance: A Slitterhead Review (Sorta?)

 

There’s an increasingly rare style of game that I would probably call the ‘accidental rental’ or the ‘friends’ older brother's game’ or the ‘game I sort of half remember playing that was on a demo disc that I might have borrowed but now in trying to recall it I sort of sound like I’m making it up’.

These games are the equivalent of horror movie sequels that you constantly tell your friends are good - the odd ducks at the back of the pond that show glimpses of ideas that stick with you forever, no matter how janky or uneven the delivery or total package. 

A real highlight of this genre for me has to be Forbidden Siren*. I remember encountering it initially from (I believe) an Official Playstation Magazine UK demo disc and just being completely captivated by the whole experience. I had no fucking idea what was happening, but it was compelling, interesting, and so acutely odd. 

I’m honestly fortunate that Forbidden Siren became a cult hit and has re-releases and devoted fans (and games inspired by it - go check out Atama on Steam), but the PS2 was lousy with these kinds of odd experiments in navigating 3D spaces inside this odd sliver of time before we locked down accepted practices and standardised controls. 

Does the second analogue stick control the camera? Maybe. Is X accept and O cancel? Mmmmmmaybe. Are the triggers going to be used for anything this time? Maybe!

An artist's impression of what it was like to encounter the fabled Blue Disc of Infinite Value.

There was (for me at least) a level of joy to be found in accepting and expecting confusion inside every demo or odd little rental in this era. With the amount of games available and the limited amount of recognition and coverage around those games, a lot of the time you were challenged to give up having preconceptions of what a game should be and instead engage with the game that you got and hope that something would click and/or that the demo you eagerly replayed would get a release in your region. Or a release at all. 

I don’t want to over-romanticise the past too much - different people have different experiences of the PS2, and I had the benefit of a neighbourhood full of eager and active pirates which made my own gaming cost significantly less, but for me this era was particularly special, and it was special because you could constantly engage in Peak Garbage (complimentary). 

This is all to say that I played Slitterhead and I fuckin loved it. 

I could spend all day talking about (and taking screenshots of) so many of the design elements in this game, they're completely out of control levels of cool.

If you have never encountered Slitterhead or heard of Slitterhead I would recommend this game without hesitation. It’s weird, it’s silly, it has some slightly iffy politics, you probably won’t enjoy it all that much, and when you describe it you’ll sound fucking stupid. 

“You change bodies to solve puzzles but you don’t really need to!”, “You’re gonna want to track down all of the secrets because you can dress up a nerd in two jackets and make him look silly.”, “Queen Elizabeth the 2nd is a secret character and she’s borderline broken, she’s maybe the strongest in the whole game.” 

Didn't believe me? Bam - two jackets, one for the head one for the waist.

Here’s the elevator pitch: you’re a ghost with no memories in not-Kowloon and you gotta take over peoples’ brains to use them to eliminate the Slitterheads; weird creatures that prey on humans. You jump from person to person to solve puzzles and move around the world, but your main points of contact are a handful of key humans with extra special blood weapons and blood powers - these key humans have information and goals that will help drive the story forwards and help you with your overarching goal of stopping a Slitterhead-related apocalypse. Uncover the mystery and go buck wild, just enjoy yourself, go nuts. 

Oh you thought this was a fucking game? Here she is: she's called Betty, she uses a blood umbrella, and she's a fucking menace. Real Slitter-heads know what's up. 

As you progress you uncover bits of story presented with minimal voice acting, little glimpses of clarity through a curtain of ignorance as you loop time in an attempt to un-fuck things. Of course, as with all good time travel stories, your looping and disregard for regular causality fucks things up even more, and we’re dragged into a pretty depressing web of action, reaction, and regret for action. 

So much of the game is kept from you - your core ghost memories, displayed in-game as glowing golden clouds to optionally collect, are hidden behind a separate fictional language, the hazy drama that brought you to this moment a (mostly) unanswered series of questions. At its best the game is suffused with this heavy sense of blame, every human you cast aside a reminder of your selective priorities - the guiding light of the game an appeal to the dignity of life set against the packed neon core of not-Kowloon. 

And you’re also just sort of smacking creatures with weapons and powers, just wailing on them, just beating the shit out of them. 

Slitterhead is odd, but it’s charmingly odd. From the music, to the menus, to the setting there remains this indelible Slitterhead-ness about the whole experience. You are playing a game that isn’t trying to be anything else; yes, it does draw from a dozen other games in crafting its gameplay stew, but it isn’t trying to be a Soulslike, or a survival horror, or the true return of Silent Hill, or Persona for adults it’s trying to be… Slitterhead. Does this mean that it is good? Not really!

What it is is undeniably itself. Yeah it takes scaffolding from Forbidden Siren and For Honour (lmao) but like every good Young Adult protagonist, Slitterhead tries to be itself even if the itself it ends up being is a bit grating and occasionally repetitive. There’s real fucking heart here, and there’s a genuinely compelling 6/10 video nasty quality to it all that made me misty eyed for that demo-disc era of games taking their tenuous steps into a world that was exploding in a wave of innovations and failed experiments.

Even if you aren’t really feeling Slitterhead I’d encourage you to go and find something like it - something new, something weird, something novel. If nothing else I want to emphasise how refreshing it felt to play an old-feeling new game like this, how great it is to not know what is going to happen next or what steps the game is going to take. We used to have games like this! It makes me want to replay Silent Hill 4: The Room! Companies used to throw random amounts of money to make these games, games that have only the vaguest understanding of things like ‘metrics’, ‘key verticals’, and 'sales targets'!

Go get challenged by something that might suck, go find the next Tokyo Jungle and hype it up before someone else does and make a Youtube career out of it, go replay The Last Guardian and get mad that people aren’t talking about it constantly, maybe try Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess that’s a pretty good new one or To a T.

Just go find a game that really makes you feel something new or experience something new that you might not like or understand. Games like Slitterhead are an essential part of a healthy, balanced diet because they help you expand your vocabulary and your palate - you get to better understand what 'good' means to you, or what 'bad' means, or what 'interesting' means, and that's an incredibly rare feeling in games at the moment.

*I should’ve looked this up before writing this, but like the vast majority of Bokeh Game Studio did work on the Siren series. I also should note that I’ve been saying (and typing) Forbidden Siren for years, not knowing that this was the PAL-exclusive title lmfao.

I’m Starting To Wish I Didn’t Have To Parry Things

When you run around at 100mph in Doom firing rockets from the hip you feel good, you look good, you're moisturised, you're nourished, and you are present in an experience that simply cannot be approached in anything remotely resembling real life. We jump higher, move faster, and are altogether more important when we’re piloting our virtual avatar than when we pilot our sad, vulnerable flesh. 

We’re empowered, and we’re rocking out, and that’s videogames baby. 

We can also fail harder, and in increasingly fun and implausible ways. For me, the best games are the one that present the player with an obscene number of embarrassing ways to fuck up in the pursuit of cool. I will always be a cheerleader for points systems and grading systems that explicitly tell you that your success was on a scale, but I’ll also take a big fuckin bail from a skateboard or a huge slow motion car crash or even a deeply awkward slide down a climable surface made slick with sudden rain. 

Failure - catastrophic, unmitigated, player-directed failure - is just as important to an empowering experience as a success for having a dang ol fun time, and right now we have never been more hungry for failure. If you want to fail hard in games you are in the exact right era for it; the days of cutscenes and QTEs are gone, replaced by the abusable i-frame and the high-skill epic gamer parry. 

And that’s where we have our problem. 

The scrapped title for this blog was 'Parry-appa The Rapper' 

The Case Against The Parry

I’m a bit sick of parrying in complex combat games. 

Glad I’ve said that, case closed, we beat the parry good job everyone. 

I’m a bit sick of it because the loathsome, perfidious mechanic has pressed its huge, calloused gaming thumb on the scale and tilted the experience too far towards pure empowerment. 

This isn’t so much about the actual challenge itself: parrying a million times in Jedi Survivor or Stellar Blade, Lies of P, Wukong etc. is still miles harder than most eras of game releases, demanding a level of attentiveness and reaction that evokes the same sweaty-handed feeling as your 15th go at the Battletoads bike level. No, what has been lost in our embrace of the parry system is the feeling of challenge, the smallness of failure, the desperation of barely squeaking by.   

When you parry a move in a game you are facing your challenges head on, deflecting them with perfect timing, strength, and control. Parrying being the primary (or most obviously rewarding) means to defend means that you naturally maintain a huge level of presence within the game itself. Imagine being able to parry in Shadow of The Colossus, how much smaller the colossi would seem.

When your character can parry everything, we’re introduced to a vision of difficulty where challenge is overcome with aura rather than grit. You are supposed to move through these fights perfectly, and your character traversing the dour aftermath as if it wasn’t a big deal reflects this. Good job: you’ve achieved the expected result in the expected way, you parried all 40 hits of God’s level 3 super and now you can stride towards the next challenge, dying embarrassingly a couple of times to some regular enemies whose patterns you forgot.   

The parry has robbed us of our ability to struggle, and forced us into a dynamic where we can either be perfect or dead. It is a false prophet; a reduction of an emotional combat ballet into the simple tricks of a rhythm game and should be banished (or, alternatively, games should start to rely on it less frequently). 

But without the parry, what could we possibly rely on as our primary defensive mechanic? What should we do? Doushio?

Dw bro this attack isn't actually that hard to deal with once you get the timing down

Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down

The humble roll is the truly pure and good video game difficulty mechanic precisely because it is everything the parry isn’t - rolling makes you smaller, weaker, more evasive, less able to stand up for yourself (because you’re rolling!). Rolling away from strikes and patterns that could squash you like a bug isn’t particularly impressive looking, but you know what’s infinitely worse?

Failing to roll away, getting the timing wrong and leaving yourself deliciously, helplessly fucked as the Great Guardian Toad’s mighty hammer turns you into pâté because you misread the windup.

 

The player is strong, handsome, and important by default. When you roll desperately out of the way, or take a block that chips away at your health and leaves you in enough blockstun to only barely react to the next hit, we start to become that much more human, closer to real life, closer to a sense of genuine failure. 

We can beat the boss, we can beat the challenge, we can progress forwards, but the first time might look obscenely bad. Str-ugly-ing through is great - it’s the pure essence of Good Videogame Shit and when we look too strong and feel too strong we lose the raw, emotive sense of it all.   

What point is there in being able to swagger through a fight if we haven’t crawled through it first? What do we gain from graceful perfection if it’s dictated? Isn’t it better to be able to go back and choose to strive for that perfect or near-perfect clear than it is to make that the way that success looks by default? 

In Devil May Cry or Bayonetta we’re granted superhuman swagger, but we’re graded to the exacting standards of a superhuman. Success with a D-rank doesn’t feel like success at all, it’s the first step in understanding that you can do more than squeak by. In Skate we’re asked to slide our foot to the back of the board and quickly flick forwards, a wobbly, off-balance ollie a resounding victory for a skater who doesn’t want to ragdoll into the side of a kerb anymore. We can build towards a Pure Platinum rank later, right now you just need to keep your balance and fight through the next challenge.

Scales of success, from not getting hit to not using items to beating the boss in a certain amount of time to using a certain weapon, lets us experience the fullness of difficulty a game has to offer (and beyond, if we use the space to create our own challenges). Parrying as the now-ubiquitous means to engineer difficulty and dictate a pass/fail creates a funnel for our player experience, transforming our struggle (and our success) into something that is inevitable and singular in shape. 

This isn’t to say that the parry is Bad, far from it. I’m just sick of the parry feeling like the only. We’ve taken so many steps forwards with regards to games and difficulty since 2008 so why does it feel like we’ve regressed back to pressing triangle at the right time to Arkham Asylum slam a thug into a wall. The difficulty has gotten harder, the timing has gotten tighter, but we’re still engaging in a repetitive fantasy of seemingly effortless martial power. 

Plus I’m unsure why you would focus on parrying in this post-MGR renaissance. You’re not gonna be as satisfyingly difficult and varied as Sekiro, and you almost certainly lose the aura-off against MGR. You’re not Him, nano-bro (kill me, shoot me in the head, throw my body to the ants and let their industrious little colonies disappear my sins).

Wicked: Part 1: The Game of the Film of the Musical

I went and saw Wicked relatively recently and it rocked. There’s a lot of small things I would change: why did they dress Elphaba in a way that made her look cool when she explicitly isn’t supposed to be, there’s a whole song about it and she looked like… a bit dour, but with well-fitted, clean clothes? I’m a big fan of the stage costume where she just looks a little shabby and sad - it compliments her ‘too good for all this’ attitude, but it gets buried under the raw, magical enthusiasm that powers the film adaptation. 

Could they have done away with the opening song when it doesn’t at all pay off as a motif or as a framing device in Part 1? I know that ‘No One Mourns the Wicked’ is a bop but as far as storytelling goes it doesn’t really do anything until later. If this was the opening of Part 2 we’d have some stakes and we’d understand a little bit better how the world has changed, how attitudes have shifted in the interim.

Great film though, I had so much fun watching it and just basking in the emotional simplicity of it all; the joy, the enthusiastic performances, the great sets, the amazing songs. It took me back to a time long ago… when I was young and unafraid, and games were made and used and wasted as releases alongside every major family film no matter how flimsy the premise. 

So I thought to myself: what would Wicked: The Game look like? 

(Disclaimer - if you want any of these billion dollar genious ideas, take em’. I got more. In exchange you have to promise to name-drop me in interviews after you become super famous and rich.) 

Wicked: The Mobile Game

15,000 hours in photoshop

Picture this: you’ve just come out of the hit film Wicked: Part 1. Siri has already scanned your calendar, bank account, messages, and phonecalls, so when your eyes adjust to the daylight (you saw a matinee performance) and your phone springs to life again you are greeted by 8 missed calls and an ad for Wicked: The Mobile Game. 

You click it out of curiosity, but it looks… disturbingly familiar. A pixelated Elphaba flies on her broomstick between endless pipes as the player taps the screen in a janky rhythm to keep her airborne? This isn’t an original game: this is a reskin! Of Flappy Bird!

That’s right, the hit mobile sensation is back and it’s better than ever, packed to the brim with all the modern conveniences we know and love (pay to get more lives, ads, lots of low-level gambling, weirdly laggy) but with a refreshingly retro vibe - a direct rip-off with a brand on it, just like Grandma used to buy.  

Is this a serious thought that required serious brain power to manifest? God no, absolutely fuckin’ not. But you gotta think that this exact thing would make at least 100x its production cost back on the app store. This or an Ozdust Ballroom-themed Just Dance or something, man. Literally free money. 

Red Blood, Yellow Bricks: A Munchkinland Murder Story

Funnily enough I only watched The Long Goodbye yesterday

In a dim and dusty corner of Munchkinland, crime is afoot. Davis Hippo, a low level bureaucrat at the census office and animal resident of the kingdom (? I actually don’t know if it’s a kingdom) has turned up dead near a worksite for the Wizard’s ambitious interconnected road project. Ruled a workplace accident by Munchkinland authorities, the grieving widow searches for an alternative for justice and finds… you, Champlin Kell, Private Detective.

As you peel back the mysteries behind Mr. Hippos death and struggle with alcoholism™ (it’s a game mechanic), you’ll uncover a plot to systematically ignore or discount animal deaths, disappearances, and related disturbances. Mr. Hippo discovered something while working at the census office, something disturbing: a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the top of Munchkinland society and possibly…even higher than that.    

Thrill! At discovering the seedy underbelly of Oz. Point! Your mouse cursor at elements on the screen that you want to investigate. Click! Around in a charming 90s-style adventure game where the emerald green reflects the greedy and jealous souls of a population willing to trade justice for profit. 

Not sure how I feel about the Munchkinlander names, they seem to have really odd naming conventions in Oz overall and I’m not that bothered to get it right! The initial idea for this was maybe a Twine game where you are slowly pressured to comply with requests to list wrongful animal deaths as accidental, or to stop counting the number of non-talking animals publicly. You would maybe get dragged into a bunch of awful, awkward e-mail chains (or the Oz equivalent) with your superior if you did it correctly, or you would have a normal, easy, boring work week if you contributed to erasing animal problems in Oz? Felt a bit grim, but also felt like this is something I could just do instead of hypothesising a rip-off that definitely sounds a little like Discworld Noir.

Ozcarraldo

Four regions! Four deserts! Four sets of challenges!

Ever since you were a child, you always dreamed of going out past the sands to see what lies beyond Oz itself. Armed with designs for a revolutionary new train, capable of travelling for thousands of kil…o…. miles (not sure what system Oz uses for measurement), you have been given the (emerald) green light by the wizard himself to go forth and explore as far as your rails can take you.

 

Gather the materials needed to make your great journey across the sands in a survival/adventure/roguelike-FTL-ass hybrid where you’re building rail infrastructure, upgrading your train, and encountering towns and problems along the way. You need resources to cross the desert (maybe a fixed amount that sits as an end-goal), you need the rail network to reach the desert, and you need information. To build the rails you spend the resources - say you need four hundred wood to cross the desert, but you learn from a town that the sands corrode iron. You can’t begin your crossing because now you know that it will fail. Another town says one of the mountain villages have something interesting to say about the sands, you spend more resources and six months to build rails to the mountains, where you learn that jade shielding stops sand corrosion, now you need to find jade. You still need to deliver 400 marble to the emerald city by the end of the year, and you need to spend 200 more wood to maintain the rail tracks etc.  

As you slowly build your rail network you find yourself indebted to others who require unique favours, the preparation for your journey contesting with the elements, the environment, and the sands of time. Maybe you get ambushed by  Munchkinland union strikes, and you compromise your values by working with emerald city Pinkertons, maybe you try and convince a rural village that the train is a benevolent god who will reward them with riches if the tracks remain protected and the workers unhurt. Whatever you do, the more you build, the more you are distracted by favour and obligations, the more the criss-cross of tracks help to imprison you in Oz forever. 

Your goal is always to move forwards, to reach the sands and, with the power of industry, conquer them. Your fate is always to become trapped, a cog in a machine that provides the Emerald City with quick access to unlimited resources, and in the end you are thrown away, your railways torn up, and your train - once a magnificent symbol of freedom - repurposed for a single fancy school. 

Start in one of four areas (Munchkin, Gilliken, Quadling, or Winkie) with one of four great trains and FTL your way to your impassable desert of choice through the country of your choice, get stuck! Build relationships! Break relationships! Always travelling back and forth in endless preparation for your impossible journey! You’ll never make it!

I can see a version of this where you probably can make it to the edge with resources to spare for your desert crossing. Then, when you’ve finally conquered the impossible, when you’ve finally overcome a million small failures, you make it through and end up, improbably, right back in Oz. We definitely got a little too deep into this idea, really boring stuff, probably should end it now. 

Emerald City start point DLC would work to expand it naturally, I think. 

You can unlock Akuma as a playable character if you conquer all four deserts.

Weird that there was only a single train in Wicked. They really fucked up there. The People want more trains.

DUMB SCRAPS GO! RAPID FIRE ROUND BATTLE SHARK FEVER BEAM 

• One of the Harry Potter PS1 games that everyone loves but make it Wicked. Not sure it’d work because fuck all people learn magic and Shiz mostly seems like a finishing school. Enjoy learning teacup pattern tarot and the differences in etiquette between thanking a father-in-law and thanking a mid-level waiter. 

• The Wonderful Wiz-kid Of Oz: a children’s themed trivia game where the conceit is that you are taking part in a competition where the winner gets to meet the wizard. Eh!

• Farm With Your Dad Simulator: Play as Dorothy taking care of the farm. As the days pass and the farming gets more routine the characters around you start dropping these really odd, on-the-nose hints about the Wizard of Oz, “Winds picking up… soon it’ll be strong enough to blow away a house! Maybe even to another country and/or place!” or “You know what I always say: tin is for the shameless, straw is for the brainless, and lions exist!”. You just keep on farming until the big storm hits, at which point it is revealed that you were the wrong Dorothy on the wrong farm, game over. 

Happy New Year! I guess!

A Quiet Place: A Relevant and On-Time Film Review

 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. 

I was not impressed with A Quiet Place at all. It is, to not tease out the joke any further, fetish content with a vague horror story that thrums in the background doing its absolute best to make the film work. This is a post-Rapture film, not a post-apocalyptic one, and the only thing it cares about is our characters moral purity - something it apparently believes is self-evidently interesting without any need for conflict or challenge. It sits so uncomfortably with me that one could make a horror film that relentlessly edifies an almost laughably artificial picture of an ideal type of life without trying to disrupt or criticise in any meaningful way, an absurd exercise in coddling and validating viewer who sees in this film a utopia (minus the monsters).

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.

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.

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.