Sometimes I feel like I’m experiencing a different reality from everyone else, and maybe I’m being… trolled.
Like when people say Hamish and Andy aren’t funny.
Or they don’t find babies that cute.
Or they just aren’t ‘dog people’.
But most recently, I walked out of the cinema after watching A Quiet Place, feeling I had been completely and utterly lied to.
This is a film that has a score of 95 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Just for reference, the movie Bad Neighbours 2, which is funny and entertaining AND has a Zac Efron only has a score of 62 per cent.
It's had glowing reviews in almost every major news publication in the country, including this one, and had one of the biggest debut weekends at the box office ever for a horror movie. Better than The Conjuring. And Paranormal Activity.
It's likely to be the second highest grossing film of the year in the US, behind Black Panther, and I feel like I'm missing something.
A Quiet Place is set in 2020, after most of the human population has been killed by alien creatures who attack any person or animal who makes a noise. The Abbott family live in silence, able to communicate using sign language, because their daughter Regan is deaf. They exist in terror, however, that a single sound will see their lives taken in an instant by one of the huge, violent creatures.
Why do they do this? Not sure.
When did this start? Unclear.
What are the weird creature things? Eh, not important.
Immediately, there are countless questions.
Have this family not coughed? Sneezed? Farted? Diarrhea-d? Turned a tap on? Had a door slam? Slept talked? Screamed or cried about the fact that random monsters have taken over the planet for no reason?
We're shown newspaper clippings with headlines about how silence is the way to survive, but HOW WERE THE PAPERS PRINTED WHEN THE PRINTER WOULD'VE MADE A NOISE AND HAD EVERYONE IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY KILLED.
As I took in the premise of A Quiet Place, it felt like a bad episode of The Walking Dead. Everyone's going to die, because sound is a thing humans make, and they're trying to avoid it for as long as possible.
Watch the trailer for A Quiet Place below. Post continues.
It therefore brings with it the same logistical issues as living during a zombie apocalypse. Such as: everything.
Are we meant to believe that an average American family has the skills to live in complete isolation, gathering enough food, water, medical supplies, heat, shelter, etc to appear to be in perfect physical health, while also fending off scary alien creatures that will kill them immediately if they so much as drop something?
Also, the aliens have vagina-faces which is both unoriginal and off-putting.
There are a handful of gripping scenes. Emily Blunt's character Evelyn trying to go through labour in silence, then stepping on an upright nail is excruciating to watch. As is watching her giving birth in a bathtub while an alien demon stalks her.
But it's one of those frustrating movies where the alien kills every other human in an instant, but when it wants to attack Evelyn, it walks slowly towards her, looks her in the eye, and thinks about it for exactly long enough for someone to save her. Which, to be honest, I wasn't overwhelmingly invested in.
I struggled to have any empathy with the characters, because I had too many questions.
Why was there no background? No explanation of what had happened?
How am I meant to become invested in a story I don't even really understand? Or feel for characters when what they're going through seems completely and utterly ridiculous?
I won't spoil the ending, except to say that the 'solution' to warding off the creatures is arbitrary, nonsensical and corny.
Apart from the fractured relationship between Regan and her father Lee, played by John Krasinski, we don't get a great deal of insight into the characters. They're also not particularly likeable or unlikeable - probably because they don't say anything.
So why does everyone keep recommending A Quiet Place? Why are so many people going to see it?
It seems like the novelty of the film - with an original premise and such little dialogue - is what has allowed it to gain traction. As has the pairing of real-life couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski in the lead roles.
But this is not a brilliant horror movie.
This is average, if not... actually pretty bad.
And it's definitely not worth the $128 it currently costs to go to the movies.
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