Emma wastes $25: The Story Of A Pretty Alright Movie.

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A Quiet Place (2018)

Directed by John Krasinski
Produced by Micheal Bay, Brad Fuller and
Andrew Form
Cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Edited by Christopher Tellefsen
Starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe



Originally released April 6th, 2018.



     Let me paint you a picture. It's a dark, chilly April day. The clouds hang low in the sky, heavy with impending rain. I roll out of bed determined to make it to the 12 pm screening of a movie I've heard only good things about. People are saying that it will redefine horror as a genre. As a frickin' GENRE. That's a lofty claim that I am skeptical of, but I'm very much looking forward to seeing for myself! I'm speeding down to the Cineplex at Young and Dundas as fast as my stinky little feet can carry me. As I motor onto Dundas, only a couple of blocks away from my destination, I am simultaneously confronted with a bird pooping on me and nearly running right in to a man shouting incoherently into the street wearing a jacket that can only be described as "crunchy". When I arrive at the theater, I discover that they're only showing the movie I'm there for in VIP. It's $25 a ticket. I sigh and figure, based on the reviews I've heard, it'll be worth it. Spoiler: it is not. It's Friday, April 13th, 2018.


**I'd like to take a quick moment here and warn you that there will be spoilers ahead. So if you've got $25 you were going to light on fire after reading this review, I suggest that you do neither of those things and instead head on down to your local Cineplex and give that cash to them. It'll have virtually the same result.**
 

Why is it that when the world goes to shit,
all the stop lights fall down? Is it a feature of their design?

     So it's the year 2020, and a plague of sightless aliens who hunt using exceptional hearing have ravaged the earth, killing almost everyone. The Abbott family - Lee and Evelyn Abbot and their children Regan, Marcus and Beau - live on a hobby farm in what looks like Maine? Vermont? I don't know. Anyway, their oldest child Regan is deaf, so the family is all accustomed to using ASL (American sign language). How lucky is that? They've become very accustomed to living in silence as to avoid detection from the creatures that lurk in the surrounding woods. Early on, we see their youngest child Beau killed by one of said creatures in a pretty intense scene, but the real horror gets going two years later. Evelyn is pregnant, and for reasons I can not fathom, everyone seems pretty pumped about it! When Evelyn goes into early labor while alone at the farm, all hell breaks loose. The features of  this set up make for some genuinely very scary moments in an otherwise unremarkable film.


   

Oh honey, I'm so glad you looted Pottery Barn
before everyone else got to it!

     If you watch this L.L. Bean commercial from this past holiday season without the sound on, you've pretty much watched the trailer for this movie. Obviously I'm exaggerating, but less than you may think. A Quiet Place looks like if the December 1991 issue of Country Living Magazine and a recent issue of Fangoria had a pretty unsettling, very quiet baby. I love it. I think it's beautiful. All these really attractive, clear-skinned, thin white people running around (or walking barefoot, slowly on trails of sawdust (?) if you want to be specific) in lovely wool knit sweaters and overalls. That's my shit. At one point, they eat a meal of fish cooked in the floor (for silence's sake I guess) that looks like fucking Antoni and Bobby from Queer Eye teamed up to make it. Their house, while definitely altered for the purpose of being less noisy (painted squares on the floor for where to walk, doors tethered open to prevent slamming, etc.) is very pretty. Lot's of wild flowers and lace curtains and nice quilts and shit. It's very Instagramable. It's also very much my vibe. But it seems a little unrealistic for a family that is living through the apocalypse to have such a keen sense of design. I know that the only thing they have to alter about their life is to be quiet, and that maybe leaves them with lots of time on their hands, but I found the picturesque beauty of their living spaces really distracting. Also John Krasinski's beard can fucking get it. Not the man, just the beard (like, someone have that facial hair give me a call). I feel like Krasinski was a quintessentially tall skinny nerd for the first two thirds of his life and he's just discovered that he's Kilmered (the effect of thickening, but not necessarily gaining weight as one ages. It often has a negative effect, but not in this case) and is all hot and "manly" now, so there's a lot of that in this movie. Which brings us to our next topic...

But DaaaAaAd, I don't wanna be in an L.L. Bean campaign!

     This film seemed oddly heteronormative. Like it seemed to go out of it's way to reinforce gendered stereotypes. For instance, as much as I loved (looooved) Emily Blunt's performance, it was a little disappointing that the horror her character experiences in the film was so deeply rooted in the only thing the patriarchy thinks women are good for: making babies. Would it be horrifying to have to give birth silently while a toothy alien with big ear holes stalks you through your house? Yeah totally. And giving birth is an experience a large portion of the population has had, so it's an effective way to connect the horror in your film to the audience. But based on the rigid stereotypes on display throughout the rest of the movie, the concept of the only adult woman in this film experiencing the bulk of her horror through childbirth feels pretty unimaginative. Also holy shit to her getting pregnant in the first place! I mean come the fuck on. No way. Just an objectively bad idea to bring a child into this specific world. Wrap it up, Lee! Jesus. Other examples of the oddly 1950's values in this film are the depiction of the patriarch and matriarch's respective daily tasks. Lee does things like chop wood, hammer fence posts, and take his son fishing, while Evelyn literally cooks and cleans and does laundry (and is pregnant). The scene where their daughter Regan expresses a desire to go on a fishing trip with Dad and is dismissed right away is both sexist and ableist. A case could be made for this just being the result of a father's concern for his child while living in an impossibly stressful environment, but as with everything in film, this was a deliberate choice. These people aren't real. They're conceived of by flawed human beings who clearly couldn't help but impose their own outdated feelings about gender politics on their characters.

There's a lot of this. The finger thing. Like, we get it. You've got to be quiet.
 Also that's Emily Blunt on the left and Millicent Simmonds on the right.

     For all it's glaring flaws, this film got casting spot on. Everyone in it was excellent, but there were two performances that really stood out. At one point, it registered with me that watching Emily Blunt's performance was making me literally nauseous. Not because it was bad, but because it was that good. I was feeling some semblance of what her character must have been feeling. Rarely is an actor able to pull an audience in and produce such a strong physical sensation. This character's physical pain and mental fear was palpable. And Blunt was 100% committed. She was all in. It was that commitment that made this performance one for the books. If you go to see this for no other reason than Emily Blunt, it'll be well worth your while. Also, big shout out to new comer Millicent Simmonds. What an exceptional start for a kid with only two acting credits to her name. Her performance in A Quiet Place was mature and nuanced. I'm really looking forward to seeing more from her in the future. Also really glad they cast an actual deaf person for the role of a deaf person in the film. What a novel idea (that's sarcasm, just in case that doesn't read). As much as women get the short end of the stick for the majority of this film naritively, the two and only performances by women are what make it watchable.


     So yeah. Overall, I wasn't super impressed with this movie. I liked it alright, and some of the scares really got me, but by the time the credits rolled I was left with a strange and oddly familiar bad taste in my mouth. As I sat and watched the names of the people involved flash up on the screen and the majority of the people in theater file out, I realized where this taste had come from. "Producer Micheal Bay". Ooooohhhhhhh. It was Bayhem. That weird turn the movie takes for the last quarter and that ill fitting ending was Bayhem. If you're not familiar with Bayhem, it's the insidious, chaotic and almost spiritual effect that Micheal Bay has on everything he touches. Here's a video by Tony Zhou that explains the phenomenon way better then I can. Anyway, I found A Quiet Place thoroughly O.K. and I wish I hadn't spent as much on it as I did, but here we are. I hope that pigeon that pooped on me is doing well!     



***


     Yikers. I'm sorry if ya'll found this one disappointing. I know lots of people who are really pumped to see this. Heck, I was one of those people before I saw it. And if you saw it and enjoyed it, well I don't blame you. I saw every penny of the $17 million they spent on it up on the screen, and it does achieve some pretty effective and moving moments. But gosh darn. When you've seen one movie about a pretty white family fighting aliens, you've seen em' all. Am I right?

Peace out. See you next week! Be nice to pigeons :)