Don’t fart so loud, dammit!
The power of a story depends, to a large extent, on how much the audience buys into the story. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, through verisimilitude, magnetic characters, and sensory overload. The movie A Quiet Place (2018), however, inverts that last method to accomplish its goals. Set in roughly contemporary times, humanity is being hunted by creatures that primarily use the sense of sound for detection of their prey. This is the story of one farming family, surviving by their adherence of to their code of silence, a code that, on abuse, results in the sudden and violent death of the apostate.
This results in a movie with nearly as little dialogue as The Artist (2011), where the silence has a reason both integral to the story and as a mechanism for focusing the audience’s attention. Similarly, in this movie, the silence with which the characters must live focuses our attention on how the noise we generate that we ordinarily don’t even notice signals our location to anything that cares to listen: other humans, cats, dogs … predators. Their care to minimize their sonic signals acts to emphasize those powerful moments when a misstep puts them in mortal danger.
Or, worse, when the emergence of new life, engendering the cries of pain for us thin-hipped evolutionary trade-offs, brings on the worst.
The storytellers are wise, for the very manner in which mankind is being hunted is also used to fight back, and that cleverness, even if accidental, makes the story that much more interesting. Hearkening back to my preferred theory of story, that stories remain central to the human experience because they teach lessons of survival and success through depictions of the consequences of choices in specific situations, this story is a reminder that not all curses are unalloyed, that the sharpest spear may be turned against its wielder.
I said that stories succeed on how well they engage their audiences, and part of that engagement acts as a barrier to hide the holes that develop in most stories. A Quiet Place has one or two holes. For example, the hunters appear to have specialized completely in sonics, being completely blind, and apparently insensitive to odors. Does this make sense? Would a predator the size of a human, more or less, really be completely incapable of sensing odor or light? While not impossible, it seems highly unlikely.
My Arts Editor pointed out that another approach to the problem of sonic-oriented predators might be to go the opposite way: magnify the general sonic landscape. A wind-chime in every tree, perhaps.
But I think these are minor quibbles. If you violently hate horror movies, you won’t like this.
Otherwise, Recommended.
