Friday 13 April 2018

A Quiet Place

The horror is tricky to get right and modern horror films have developed a new set of rules for the genre. They tend to be sub-par, a parody of its own genre, pandering to the lowest common denominator with copious and unnecessary amounts of gore and cheap, poorly filmed jump-scares. Sad as that may be, there is a silver lining; namely, in a genre saturated with bad films, whenever there is a decent one, it gets the appropriate attention and praise it deserves. Last year the exception to the rule was Get Out – a different, unique horror film that audiences and critics alike adored, partly due to its strength and partly because it stood out among the slew of films released at the same time. And now this year, we have A Quiet Place, comparable to Get Out in how it has made a splash in Hollywood, bringing in a large audience and receiving universal praise and adoration. Personally, I haven’t seen suspense like this in a film since Berlin Syndrome at the 2017 Glasgow Film Festival.  

Cinema may be an audiovisual medium, but silence is one of the most effective tools a film-maker has at their disposal. When used well, the absence of any and all noise can draw an audience into a moment like nothing else, instantly ramping up the tension as they tentatively wait to see what might be behind the sudden need for quiet. It's a very primal reaction that films have been taking advantage of for decades now, and it's one that A Quiet Place uses to great effect, making well-established techniques feel incredibly fresh in the process.

I mean, it's kind of genius really. By setting a horror movie in a world where making any kind of noise is likely to get you killed by a lightning fast and virtually invulnerable alien predator, A Quiet Place finds an in-universe excuse to never allow its audience the release of tension that something as simple as a conversation or the hustle and bustle of normal life often provides. Most of the time, a dead silence in a horror film indicates that something is about to jump out and scare you - here, it's indicative of nothing in particular, offering no clues about if the characters we follow throughout (the Abbott family) are in immediate danger or not, and that can't help but imbue every single scene with a staggering amount of suspense that the film itself doesn't even need to work that hard to maintain. Even the most ordinary of day-to-day tasks take on extra significance when the smallest of slip ups will have deadly consequences, and that's something that A Quiet Place takes great pleasure in playing with.

A Quiet Place is really intelligently written - not that it's thematically deep or scientifically accurate or asking big philosophical questions of its audience, but simply because it has a really solid understanding of how to get the most out of its premise. The film never abandons its smart suspense building techniques in favour of the kind of exciting but dumb chase sequences you could easily imagine it falling back on. Everything logically stems from the thing that preceded it, resulting in a film that feels less like a monster movie and more like watching a carefully constructed Rube Goldberg machine operate without fault. A sound attracts the aliens; the Abbotts do something to draw the aliens away; now they must deal with the consequences of what they did to draw the aliens away. It's nothing groundbreaking by any means but it gives a sense of internal consistency, a sense of consequence that is vital to its success.

It helps, of course, that director/co-writer/star John Krasinski seems just as at home behind the camera as he does in front of it. The amount of visual storytelling required of this kind of film means it could've easily collapsed under its own weight with a less capable director at the helm - fortunately, Krasinski instead makes it all seem quite easy, ensuring throughout that the audience have all the information they need at any given moment to fully understand the stakes of the situation at hand.

None of this is to say that A Quiet Place is flawless, of course. I wish the ending had been reworked but having said that, the poor ending did very little to detract from what A Quiet Place ultimately is - a ridiculously tense and really well put together monster movie that at just 90 minutes long knows what it is and doesn't feel like wasting your time. It's smart, measured, well thought out and imbued with the kind of suspense that I really wish we saw more of in modern cinema.

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