23 Dec A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

Memories

What’s interesting to me is how genres evolve and sub-genres emerge. This is still advertised as a horror film, and I read some comments from disappointed film-goers that it wasn’t scary enough. What I see is a science fiction film with a consistent threat — one that is simple, pure, and overwhelming. This is simply the frame for us to encounter some characters and how they move through life. They’d move the same way without this threat environment, so in a sense we are responsible for them being placed as they are she we can have their selves clarified for us.

This is what I call the essence of noir, ordinary yobbos placed in extraordinary circumstances for our amusement.

So the success of the film — this sub-genre — depends on whether we understand the threat viscerally, and whether we join our hero in some way as she navigates.

This one worked for me, because the mechanism is simple enough to fall into. There’s a little girl taken on an outing by her much loved father. That outing included a visit to a world famous pizza spot. The dad died shortly thereafter. This is a situation I can deeply accept.

Now that the grownup girl is dying, she wants to taste that pizza again. How strong can we be? If a film like this works, we have to be enticed into the voyage. Part of the skill here is that we as viewers have already signed up to a ’no noise’ pact for the duration of the experience. More skill is that we have to have an on-screen observer who has to be safe at the end of the adventure. And we have to have an in-story place-holder for how to adopt our character.

Our hero has a cat that she both cares for and which gives her comfort. I study these narrative devices. They are there as more than metaphors, giving practiced viewers simple notions to hang on as the threat distracts our attention. I’d say this is very clever, economical and effective story-telling, down to the marionettes early in act 1.

My best film of this type is “The Girl with All the Gifts”. More nuanced. Deeper. But this worked because it was clean.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB