a quiet place (w&d john krasinski; w scott beck, bryan woods)

For reasons more to do with the professional than pleasure, I found myself watching John Krasinski’s acclaimed horror. And then wondering why or on what terms or in what parallel universe this film is worthy of being acclaimed. A Quiet Place could be a model exercise in how to take a great idea and proceed to disembowel it. The premise is that the killer aliens have finally arrived, only they function acoustically. If they hear noise, they’ll attack. Humanity has failed to be smart enough to find a solution and society has collapsed. People live in a state of Carthusian silence. Make too much noise and you’re a gonner. It’s a smart premise which functions on both a narrative and technical level, one that demands an audience pay attention  and listen. The significance of silence is amplified. Unfortunately, the film which can’t even respect the beauty of its premise. There’s a clunky score which infiltrates whenever it looks as though there’s a risk the film might flag. Which it does repeatedly. Added to which, there’s a use of jump scares akin to an over-enthusiastic barman going mad on the jaegermeister shots. ANDDD here comes another one! Down the hatch. The incongruities in the narrative are legion. There are almost more than there are rampaging monsters. The dialogue, for a film with next to none, is so reductive it deserves to be put down. And yet, dear reader, this film has been a critical and commercial success. The latter one can perhaps accept; in a list of the top 20 grossing films of all time, there are two from the F&F franchise and none that this writer would have have paid to watch. Which means there’s no accounting for taste. But how straight-laced critics can allow themselves to be seduced by this nonsense defeats me. One imagines they have been beguiled the beauty of the idea; like a child being given a shiny toy they are so distracted that their faculties are incapacitated. Much like the young boy whose merciful death at the start of the film spares him from having to negotiate the following 80 minutes of increasingly vapid sound and fury signifying nothing but the jangling sound of dollars landing in the box office coffers.