I decided to write about things that are peeving me this week, but to theme it. So I'm writing about complaints I've heard from a variety of sources about A Quiet Place, and what I think the obvious answers are. Spoilers abound.
Part 1: A Brief, Spoiler-Free Review of the Film
If you haven't seen A Quiet Place, there are two reasons that you should quit reading this review after this paragraph. The first one is that I'm going to spoil all kinds of things about the film. The second is that it's a much better use of your time than this piece. So go watch it, and then once you have some dumb criticisms about it, come back and I'll disembowel your complaints so your enjoyment can be more complete.
It's an unsettling thriller with a premise that mixes novelty (blind monsters with good hearing) and familiarity (post-apocalyptic monster-movie with some jump-scares and family values thrown in for free). It's directed by John Krasinski, who also acts in the film, which might make you think he's the star, but in fact, the central performance is from Emily Blunt as a woman who is trying to have a baby, deal with some heavy issues, and keep her family alive. Shout-outs are also due to Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, who are both persuasive in their roles.
Okay, now down to some dumb complaints and my irritable answers:
Complaint 1: OMG. WHY ARE THEY HAVING A BABY IN A POST-APOCALYPTIC WORLD FILLED WITH SOUND-SENSITIVE MONSTERS? WON'T THE BABY JUST GIVE THEM AWAY? EVER HEARD OF BIRTH CONTROL??!?!?
- People have babies by accident all the time, even people using birth control. Besides, I'm guessing during the early days, finding the pill, coming up with a sufficient supply, and then taking it at the same time every day fell pretty far down the list of important tasks. Totally possible that they just didn't think about it until it happened.
- Maybe they're having a baby on purpose. So what? Maybe they were irrational with grief after their son died. Maybe they got into a rhythm of life, and figured they could take that chance. Maybe--and anyone who's had a baby in the past year or is planning to have one soon can relate--maybe they didn't think that they should just all give up and wait to die. Maybe strength in numbers is even more important in a post-apocalyptic scenario, and they feel like they can deal with the noise. Maybe humans just have babies, no matter what circumstances they're in, especially when they're threatened, because that's part of keeping the species alive.
- The world is big. Statistically, someone would have to be pregnant during the apocalypse. Chances are, that person would be someone in a situation roughly like the one the Abbots are in.
Complaint 2: It Promotes Gun Culture.
The idea here is that the film is quietly endorsing the idea that isolated farming families holed up in the backwoods with their guns are the ultimate survivors and that privately-owned shotguns will protect your family when the government fails to do so.
Of course, the gun taken on its own wasn't going to do squat; until ultrasonic sound opened up the monster's fleshy bits, the shotgun was useless. Furthermore, the government had already failed along the same lines: force wasn't helpful without the incapacitating sound. And the family's survival wasn't because they happened to have a shotgun. In both the film's past and the film's present, the family survived for reasons that had nothing to do at all with the gun, a point the film makes explicitly clear. Outside of an accident or peaceful cooperation, there was going to be bloodshed, and using a gun makes the most sense, because guns are fast, and a scene of Emily Blunt bludgeoning a monster with an ax would be long and unnecessarily gross.
Complaint Three: Casting a Deaf Girl is Borderline Offensive
It isn't clear to me what's going on here. Here's what the Ringer wrote:
Simmonds’s casting would ideally owe to the fact she’s a fabulous actress (she was the breakout star of last year’s Wonderstruck). But it’s more likely thanks to the fact her presence justifies the choice to make the other characters adept enough at sign language to carry a movie.
To me, it seems obvious that the filmmakers started from the idea that a family that knew sign language would be at a significant advantage in the scenario they were painting, and that the search for the right cochlear implant would make a great backdrop for the father-daughter relationship, and for the discovery of the monsters' weakness, and that deaf people would know how to communicate quietly, but not how to stay quiet, so the story would work most elegantly with one deaf person in a hearing family, and that hiring a fabulous actress who is also deaf was the best way to go about finding someone to play the part.
None of this seems remotely like a problem to me.
Complaint 4: Why don't they just soundproof the whole house? Why don't they live in the soundproof room?
This is actually a pretty good question, but...my answer is that it's still in the first year and a half of the apocalypse. It takes time. It's apparently taken them most of nine months just to finish soundproofing the baby room. Give them time.
Complaint 5: How do they still have electricity?
They don't, not overall. They're getting enough to power the radio room, and the lights outside, most of which can be done with relatively accessible solar equipment, car/tractor batteries, and so on. This is a fine complaint, but it actually isn't hard for me to see how they'd have the level of access to electricity that they appear to have.
Complaint 6: Why didn't they have a giant alarm that made noise all the time to distract the monsters?
Because maybe the electricity was limited and better spent on other things. Because the monsters would attack the sound source and destroy it, which would make it wasted energy. Because you'd need to turn it on, at some point, and you wouldn't want to be standing near it.
Related to this was the question of whether people in cities were fine because their movements were masked by other sounds. My guess is that in cities, the monsters just rampaged indiscriminately, which made less sense in a place with fewer noises.
Complaint 7: Why didn't they, like, go to the waterfall to have the baby?
This complaint is just lazy. Because the baby came at least two weeks early, as is pretty easy to tell from the calendar in the film. Who knows what their actual plan for birth was?
Complaint 8: Why did they just go about their business? Why weren't they constantly armed at all times?
This is pretty contrary to Complaint 2, but it's also not hard to explain: they adapted a new normal because they figured out that if you're quiet, you'll be fine, and if you're not quiet, you're going to die for sure, even if you've got a bazooka. Again, the guns aren't helpful by themselves.
Complaint 9: It kinda feels like they made a lot of mistakes as soon as the cameras were rolling/why didn't they have a designated meeting spot for troublesome times?
Okay, but like, what mistakes did they make, taking the above into account? The only one I can really come up with is that Eleanor hangs out in the upstairs of the house for too long in the afternoon, so she's hurrying when her water breaks, and steps on the nail. That's a pretty understandable mistake. For that matter, even the nail getting snagged on the bag isn't really her fault. That said, it's also not something that would happen silently.
As far as a meeting spot: it appears from Eleanor and Lee's conversation after he takes her and the baby to the soundproof room, that there was a plan for situations like this, but that it was disrupted by the general uproar and chaos of the day. Certainly, the kids seem to think Lee's going to find them.
Complaint 10: How did Eleanor have a baby so quickly?
It's possible. I know someone whose entire labor lasted half an hour. It's rare, but I don't see that there's a better narrative alternative here than to just say "Well, wonderfully, she has fast labor." I do wonder how they cut and tied off the cord, though.
Complaint 11: Didn't anyone like, cough or fart or puke or anything like that during the course of the year?
This is actually a good question. I guess not.
Complaint 12: How did no one else notice the sensitivity to high-frequency noise?
This really bothers me, actually. I guess it all just happened so quickly?
There you have it. Some irritating questions, some irritating answers. Have you seen A Quiet Place? What questions did you have? What questions irritate you about movies? Let me know.