The Silent Screams of A Quiet Place

It doesn’t take much clairvoyance to predict that A Quiet Place is going to easily end up on my year-end best-list.

I’ve got a major soft-spot for economical genre thrillers that do a lot with a little, putting the oomph into a strong script over big budget – and does A Quiet Place deliver on all those fronts, and then some.

 

The small town streets are deserted, debris and the wake of pandemonium strewn everywhere. No people – just silence. A plague? A plague of monsters. No far-flung sci-fi premise, but just a few months up the road from where we are now, horrific creatures have descended on Earth, shredding the populace down to the most fleeting bands of survivors. A Quiet Place focuses on a single rural family, hiding out on a remote farm, just trying to exist together. Ever knock something over accidently? In this world, that’ll likely get you killed – because these alien beasts hunt by sound. The parents (Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, who also directs) must be constantly vigilant that their children maintain absolute silence, as any sneeze or sudden noise is enough to draw one of these things on you in seconds. They’ve taken great pains to put systems in place to maintain quiet and signal warnings. Bare feet pad quietly on sand-covered paths, every threat carefully planned for. Until it’s not.

 

A Quiet Place is practically dialogue-free, largely told via sign language and scant subtitles. The effect is beyond unnerving. John Krasinski is simply a revelation as a director here, working with a script from writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, it’s a master class in storytelling economics and structural effectiveness – all of which is only surpassed by the empathy of character. Blunt and Krasinski are also real-life husband and wife, and along with Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds create an all-too rare depiction of a close-knit family who genuinely care for each other and are trying to hold on, despite the crushing anxiety and dread around every corner. Simmonds is a tremendous find – the actress herself is deaf, as is her character, and having a character who’s lost in their own unique silence beyond what’s mandated by survival makes for fascinating family dynamics and superb acting. That’s all I’ll say as far as plot, but know there is a lot going on here in this simple and compelling premise.

 

Krasinski has made a sinew-taught thriller that stands tall among the likes of Get Out, Don’t Breathe and The Gift, that shares DNA with films as diverse as Pitch Black and The Mist, but that’s refreshing, unpredictable and unique. Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen (The Girl on the Train) immerses her camera in every tight corner the characters experience, making the farm environment feel real and convincing. She and Krasinski do phenomenal work focusing on character faces, making sure their eyes and expressions deftly fill the void left by any absence of dialogue. Editor Christopher Tellefsen is the man responsible for the increase in heart medication prescriptions as a result of this relentless 90-minutes. Emily Blunt blew the doors off in Edge of Tomorrow, but this might be my favorite performance of hers. She never overcompensates to make up for absent speech, and goes through a gauntlet of emotions that’s astonishing to behold. Clearly this “family project” inspired everyone to be free to do their best work.

 

It’s interesting to consider how much awareness and empathy A Quiet Place will likely inspire among the hearing for the deaf community. The audience gets to palpably experience what it might feel like to have a different range of expression from others, likely often taken for granted. Krasinski is the real deal, and those in search of smart, unnerving thrills, miss this at their peril. Very highly recommended.

Ready Player One: Virtual reality - literal overload

Ready Player One is primed for success. Every ingredient is there. A beloved pop culture novel, adapted by a directorial living legend - and not just a living legend, but the very one whose eighties touchstones of nostalgia punctuated countless pages of Ernest Cline's wonderful novel. Dream come true.

I suspect many viewers (especially ones who didn't read the book) are going to love Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. I certainly enjoyed large dollops of it. Both book and film are real works of imagination. Cline's novel of a bleak near-future where everyone's plugged into an immersive virtual reality game called the OASIS, was a magical Wonka-esque riff on nerd culture's shared iconography, but also a lightly masked cautionary tale of our escapes threatening to turn into collective dependency. When the creator (Mark Rylance) of the OASIS dies, he reveals that a special Easter Egg has been hidden somewhere in the vast gaming landscape - bestowing wealth and complete control of the OASIS to whoever finds it. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets Tron.

No expense was spared, and it shows. And for this viewer, Ready Player One was an infinitely more enjoyable reading experience than a movie. One of the great appeals of the book is that each reader gets to conjure up their own imaginary mindscapes of the OASIS and the myriad characters. That really made for a fun read. Spielberg directs with great energy and vision, but there's something about seeing everything previously imagined made so literal that kind of deadens and overwhelms the result. There is just so much CGI on view, it's impossible to catch all the details, and it makes it a little hard to really get behind the characters. There are some substantial changes from the book. Hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his gaming avatar Parzival only meet fellow gamers Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe) at the end of Cline's book. Here, they all meet up "IRL" much earlier. Part of the fun of the premise is the uncertainty of who the actual person might really be behind their avatar. When Wade wants to meet Samantha, Art3mis's real self, she warns he might be disappointed in her, and when they do (gasp!), she has a birthmark on her face. Which is pretty ridiculous given Ms. Cooke's overall gorgeousness. She's not exactly the Elephant Man, or a leper.

As Wade's antagonist, oily corporate CEO Nolan Sorrento, Ben Mendelsohn does what's supposed to be a mid-Atlantic American accent of some kind, but it seems very odd - almost Southern at times, and it's pretty distracting. Sorrento's also given a Bond-girl femme-fatale called F'nale, who's unnecessary and a little R’diculous.

I wish Spielberg had taken more stabs at social commentary here. When a bad guy holding a gun is patiently told by a squad of police to "put down your weapon," it's pretty tone-deaf in this day and age. You're practically screaming for the cop to yell, "We're only not shooting you 'cause you're white!" You have to wonder what the Paul Verhoeven of the Robocop era would have done with this story. The cast is engaging, Sheridan in kind of an earnest, early Shia LaBeouf kind of way. But too often the tone feels more generic than piercing.

The book was a lot funnier, and there's not nearly as much humor here as there should be. The digital effects and design are all incredibly impressive (MechaGodzilla!), but they're also so inescapable that they become oppressive as well. I'll say this - the mid-section where the characters must journey into the movie of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is phenomenal - a real tour de force. That sequence is worth the price of admission - I only wish the rest of the film had been as clever and engaging. While your mileage may vary, if you’re on the fence, absolutely see the film in a theater, on the biggest screen possible - as the film’s visuals will be beyond diminished on any home video format.