1/4/2024 0 Comments A quiet place 2018Directed with first-rate visual flair by John Krasinski (who knew?), this riveting near-silent thriller exudes the despair of a broken world with the concision of a Cormac McCarthy novel folded into a simplistic B-movie premise. ”O the mind, mind has mountains cliffs of fallįrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.“ A Quiet Place” develops its horrifying premise around a gimmick perfect for cinematic storytelling - in a post-apocalyptic countryside, monsters are drawn to their prey by sound, so human survivors can barely exchange more than whispers. Horror/terror films are such rituals-a kind of controlled terror seeking mastery of that experience.īut the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins warns us: Ernest Becker built on Rank’s views, insisting that the uniquely human, terrifying knowledge of one’s mortality is only partially counterbalanced by symbolic rituals warding off that awful recognition. Otto Rank, one of the early psychoanalysts, argued that the unspoken trauma of birth leaves a deep, equally unspeakable, mental residue. And I will risk the spoiler of saying that the movie ends with Regan and her mother facing extra-terrestrials on their own. I will point out the synchronicity between Regan’s deafness and the monsters’ auditory hyper-acuity and raise the question of the symbolic meaning of Evelyn’s wound. Evelyn insists that Lee go to find Regan and Marcus.Īs the plot unfolds, gender related issues take surprising, perhaps unsettling, twists, the details of which I will leave for the audience. When Lee sees the lights, he sends Marcus to set off fireworks to distract the monsters and returns home to find Evelyn and the newborn son. Struggling to remain silent in her labor, she triggers a signal light to alert the family to the emergency, and immerses herself in the bathtub to give birth. She clumsily breaks a picture frame, bringing a monster to the basement. Her amniotic bag bursts, and in her hurry to return to the sound proofed basement, she impales her heel on an exposed nail in the stairs. While the others are away, she leaves the basement to visit Beau’s bedroom one last time. When Lee takes Marcus on a field trip to teach him survival skills, Regan feels rejected and leaves the home to visit Beau’s grave. Regan, guilt and resentment smoldering, refuses to try his device. In his underground workshop Lee tries to reach other survivors by short wave radio, and works on a cochlear aid that will help Regan hear. The rest escape to the silent safety of their farm dwelling.Ī year passes as the family grieves but Regan is burdened with guilt. On the long, silent trek back to their farm, Beau, trailing the others, sets off the toy and an extra-terrestrial flashes across the screen, killing him. To be safe, Lee removes its batteries but Regan covertly returns the toy to Beau, who, when no one is looking, impulsively grabs the batteries. His father, Lee, takes it away from him because of its noise making potential. In the store, Beau is fascinated by a battery operated toy rocket ship. Her two younger brothers are Beau, four, and Marcus, a few years younger than Regan. The three children and their parents, adept at ASL because the oldest child, Regan, a pre-teen, was born deaf, silently communicate by sign language. They move in scrupulous silence, a silence that endures for most of the film. The movie opens with the family scavenging for supplies in an abandoned, near ruined store. The Abbot family are survivors of an invasion of the world by blind monsters with hyper-acute hearing. But the former is consonant with the unearthing of prehistoric female idols the latter, with the patriarchal mode of both Christianity and Freudian Oedipal theory. There is a hint of stereotyping in the emphasis on women as givers of life, and fathers as providing security. It takes us from horror to terror, involving us with a family that demonstrates courage and resilience in the face of near unmanageable threat. It involves us in an exploration of the meaning of family, introducing themes of tenderness, loss and love. A Quiet Place is not just another horror flick retreading the well-worn War of the Worlds trope.
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