a quiet place
The opening act of A Quiet Place is like a thrown gauntlet. The simple horror film premise —a family is stalked by blind monsters who hunt via sound— instantly infects the audience. As its epilogue occurs minus dialogue and music, terror mounting with every possibility of making a fatal noise, this silence is echoed by those sitting in the theatre. Chip packets are no longer crinkled. Popcorn is put aside. Drinks aren’t slurped. It’s one thing for devoted cinephiles to remain deadly silent in a Kiarostami film or a documentary about Carthusian monks, but to hear a general-release horror-movie crowd, kids ready for a good time, hushed in but a few short moments shows the surprising power of this distinctive, memorable genre-flick.
It’s, unexpectedly, the work of John Krasinski, who serves as its star, director, and co-writer. Jim from The Office has worked behind the camera before: first making a passion-project adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s satirical short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, then serving as writer/director of the very-Sundancey family-dramedy The Hollars. Befitting his turned-director path, these were character pieces full of meaty dialogue, actor’s vehicles. With A Quiet Place, though, Krasinski shows huge growth as a filmmaker; not just by how effectively he works in a genre foreign to him, but by the genuine command he shows in creating suspense and gathering tension.
Here, a single family holds out in a farmhouse in rural upstate New York; bucolic small-town America turned menacing. They communicate via sign-language, get about barefoot, play padded games of Monopoly; try and exist without making a sound. Krasinski plays a father-figure familiar from post-apocalyptic filmscapes: the avatar of male competency, a practical type full of inventions and plans. As well as working, tirelessly, to try and soundproof a monster-resistant basement, he also tinkers endlessly at fashioning homemade cochlear implants for his hearing-impaired daughter, played by Millicent Simmonds (so great in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck). His son, Noah Jupe (AKA the pissy kid from Suburbicon) isn’t taking to this terrifying landscape quite so swimmingly, though, living in a constant state of near-death panic leaving him with mounting anxiety.
The real glue o’ the family is Emily Blunt; Krasinski’s off-screen wife playing his on-screen one. She’s the kin’s source of strength, empathy, unexpected humour; not just barefoot and pregnant, but administering daily medical self-check-ups, preparing ’grammable dinners in monster-averting silence, and wielding a shotgun like she means it (bringing back pleasant memories of Blunt badassery in the great Edge Of Tomorrow). In the best moments of the film, Blunt embodies that familiar horror-movie staple —the terrified woman alone in a darkened house— with real sense of character, conveying not just the pure fear of the hunted, but the humanity that gives birth to it.
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Speaking of birthing: the fact that she’s pregnant (which, parenthetically, means she and Johnny K evidently had silent sex, assumedly under the noisy sound-cover of the nearby river/waterfall) is not just a great next-level riff on this woman-in-peril trope, but something symbolising the narrative theme. A Quiet Place is parental anxieties played out in fantastical scenario, its main couple’s entire lives devoted to the survival of their family, the protection of their kids. The fragility —and volume— of a newborn isn’t just a potential monster-attracting disaster, but protective-parent feelings in their purest form, wildly heightened by the premise. This theme is spoken —or signed—in the dialogue: “your father will always protect you,” Blunt offers, as reassurance to spooked kids; later, in a moment of parental doubt, she wonders to her husband: “who are we if we can’t protect them?”
The idea of a family bunkering down to survive a hostile world also has endless potential as a parable; especially in a climate in which even bucolic small-town America can be the sight of massacring school shootings. The monsters themselves —first heard via bat-like sonar clicks, then witnessed in all their xenomorphy terror— aren’t, in monster-movie fashion, some grand manifestation of human ills or societal failings.
Instead, they’re a spectre looming over what plays, for the film’s final reel, as survival-horror. When one moment of accidental sound leads to a terrifying, possibly-fatal chain-reaction, A Quiet Place descends into a dark night of the family’s soul, tension unbroken for a whole third act. As the pieces are slowly, wickedly drawn together —sometimes with dark, dread-inducing humour— you feel like you’re watching genre at its essence. The absence of dialogue fosters a mise-en-scène of fear-mongering at its purest, the sustained silence/tension/terror creating such breathless fear in viewers that they, too, won’t dare make a sound.
have you seen the listers?
Screen tributes to famous artists tend to suffer from the same problem as rockumentaries: trapped by talking-heads format and bordering on hagiography, they start from the position of fandom, offering something that seems like an uncritical accessory to other, better artworks. Eddie Martin’s film on celebrated Australian artist Anthony Lister offers the opposite of these clichés: Have You Seen The Listers? not a work of respectful distance, but something uncomfortably intimate and largely unflattering; a portrait of human failure foregrounded over artistic success.
Lister is the kind of narcissist who spent years endlessly video-taping himself, which means that Martin —who previously made the very similar, very good All This Mayhem— hit the documentarian’s jackpot: Lister handing over 750,000 personal video-files for the director to sift through. These intimate glimpses provide a window unto Lister’s world, bear witness to his trials, troubles, tribulations; the chemical highs and criminal lows of a career as one of Australia’s most collectible modern artists.
The central theme of the film is Lister’s family life, with the sole recurring-talking-head his ex-partner Anika, and much of the home-vid footage centring around their three children. In what’ll surprise no one, turns out this Great Male Artist was also a kinda shitty father. But where Have You Seen The Listers? really comes to life —finding its heart, not to mention its raison d’être— is when the production becomes not a post-hoc history-lesson, but intersects with Lister’s life as he’s living it, an absent father full of regrets, committed to change. In a grand final gambit —an artwork cum film-finale cum staged declaration of love— he attempts to win back the favour of his kids via artmaking; personal, familial, and artistic identity indivisible in the documentary’s subject. Martin has no interest in heroising this subject, only portraying the humanity of a very flawed man.
the party
There’s no one in brownface in this The Party, but, boy, is it just as bad. The eighth film from Sally Potter feels like being at an awful theatre production: it’s stagey, mugging, pandering to those in the cheap-seats. It’s set —befitting a stageplay— in one night in one location, with a host of celebrity actors (Kirstin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall, Emily Mortimer, Cherry Jones, Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy) gathering for a bourgeois dinner-party. This gathering comes in celebration of Scott Thomas being made a government minister, or something, but, instead, it’s really a collection of caricatures harbouring various secrets (#4 will totally shock you!).
And, over its very, very, very slight 70 minutes, these peeps proceed to spill those secrets in grand, dramatic fashion, the rest of the cast verily gasping with each reveal. The classy actors, wry one-liners, and black-and-white photography will convince the easily-suggestible that this is an art-movie, but, really, it’s cheap, cheesy soap-opera. All its comedy and drama relies wholly on the tawdry titillation of scandalous revelation, and most of those revelations are about who is having an affair with whom. By the time a gun —Chekhov’s Gun, no less— is introduced into proceedings, it’s clear you’re watching a film operating with very little inspiration, and a great many clichés.
pop aye
They’re the original odd couple! A sad, aging architect and an Indian elephant head out on a roadtrip together, across the Thai countryside. They’re busting out of their sadsack domestic lives, where they’re neglected and mistreated, and heading back towards his childhood home, into the innocence of childhood memories and the harsh truth of family history. Along the way, we do all those familiar roadtrip-movie things: meeting a run of colourful characters, gaining wisdom and perspective, escaping from oppression, letting loose old secrets, and, finally, healing old wounds.
Kirsten Tan’s twee picture has none of the formalist daring of Thai new-wave directors (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Anocha Suwichakornpong, etc), instead feeling like a boilerplate Sundance dramedy, out to give you the feelgood feels. Its escape-from the-daily-grind tale is universal, of course, its animal star a symbol for all of our dashed dreams. After all, isn’t that what we’re all asking in our own lives: where’s my elephant?
