Ho ho, the strange progeny of the trend for films either to delay their on-screen title card until well into the action or dispense with it entirely are starting to come home to roost. There I was at a fairly well-attended late afternoon screening the other day – the adverts for fried chicken and carbonated liquid tooth decay had concluded, as had the trailers, and we were all sitting there watching Lupita Nyong'o, who I didn't know was part-Mexican until quite recently, playing an obviously very poorly woman living in a hospice just outside Manhattan. She is clearly not coping especially well with her prognosis, as we see her being spiky and hostile towards her carers and fellow patients. However, she is lured into the city by the promise of, amongst other things, pizza, as you would be.

And at this point the guy sitting two or three seats down leaned over, brow deeply ruffled, and whispered, 'I'm really sorry, but can I just check – is this the right room for Kinds of Kindness?'

Luckily, in a darkened auditorium no-one can see you boggle, much, though I suspect there was an appreciable pause before I replied. 'No, this is A Quiet Place number. . . ' (I struggled a bit at this point) 'it's not Kinds of Kindness, anyway.' He made his apologies and cleared off, but I suspect he'd already missed the first part of Lanthimos' latest. Five more minutes and he wouldn't have needed to ask, anyway, because the space monsters would have turned up.

Yes, this was A Quiet Place: Day One, and it's the third film to be released under the Quiet Place banner, but you can't really call it A Quiet Place 3 as there's another film coming out next year with the title A Quiet Place: Part Three. So what is it? A Quiet Place 2A? Not really, as it essentially spins off backwards out of the second film to become a sort-of prequel to it. A Quiet Place Minus 2? Answers to the usual place, please.

This is what happens when a smart little well-done small-scale genre piece makes a huge pile of money: the workings of big studio machinery descend upon it and, lo, a new franchise is born. The original writers aren't involved this time around, and John Krasinski has largely stepped back, so the new film is mostly the work of Michael Sarnoski, who wrote the Nicolas Cage film Pig. (Apparently Jeff Nichols was briefly in the frame to do it, but the stars weren't right and he went off to do The Bikeriders instead.) I have to say that, generally well-disposed though I am towards the two Krasinski-directed Quiet Places, I suspected this franchise would prove to have more ears than legs and they would struggle to find new gimmicks for it – the capsule synopsis for Day One sounds rather like a blown-up version of the opening sequence from the second film set somewhere a bit more urban.

Let's get back to Nyong'o, who is stuck in traffic when the space monsters make their understated arrival in New York, somehow not being reduced to paste by smashing into the skyscrapers while hiding inside meteorites. (You have to cut this series a fair bit of slack sometimes, but the films are good enough to justify it.) Soon she is hiding in a darkened theatre with a bunch of other people, amongst them Djimon Hounsou, who is on his way to do a similar cameo in the previous film (if you see what I mean). Over twenty years into the century, one can't help noting that the iconography of New York City under attack remains potent: streets filled with clouds of dust, survivors stumbling around caked in powdery debris. There is something reflexive about it, perhaps.

One bit of slack I am reluctant to cut is this: the whole point of this film is that it's a prequel to the other films, which are about people who have learned to live in near-total silence, on pain of death. So in a sense this one is about the learning curve that gets us to that point; people eventually figuring it out and shouting 'hey, those space monsters don't have – URKKK!', followed by more sensible people whispering 'hey, they don't have eyes, keep the noise down and we might be okay'. But you don't really get that. It seems to happen off-screen while Nyong'o is hors de combat, which I think is either a cheat or a missed opportunity.

Pretty soon we are off into the rout of civilisation, the massacre of mankind territory, as all the bridges off Manhattan are bombed to try to contain the space monsters, which presents the problem of how to evacuate millions of people very, very quietly. The population seems to dwindle almost to nothing very quickly, but that's practically a genre convention in this sort of film, and Nyong'o is going against the flow anyway – she still wants pizza, and ends up with only her cat and a slightly bumbling British lawyer (Joseph Quinn, who played the metalhead Dungeon Master in Stranger Things) for company – the movie was largely shot in the UK, so the Brit character may be there for contractual reasons.

What, you may reasonably ask, is so great about the pizza in northern Manhattan that Nyong'o is so fixated on it even as the world collapses about her ears? Ah, well here we come to the moment of inspiration that makes this film distinctive and very worthwhile – why shouldn't she go for pizza in the middle of an alien invasion? What's the worst that can happen? She's already dying. None of it really means anything anyway.

It's a strikingly bleak and nihilistic place for the film to start from, but after so many films where the end of the world is basically just a spectacular theme-park ride where you just know that at least some of the good guys are going to end up in a safe place probably having a pretty fun time come the closing credits, one which gives the apocalypse such wrenching metaphorical power is wrong-footing and surprisingly powerful. I suppose you could argue that it's still basically the same thing as in the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds, where civilisation is devastated but that's okay as it's given Cruise a chance to work through his issues with his kids, but even though Nyong'o ends up doing some coming to terms with her situation and reconnecting with life, there is never a whiff of a cop-out here.

Nyong'o gives a very fine performance, well-supported by Quinn, and Sarnowski enjoys using his big budget to mount some impressive set-pieces, with swarms of space monsters scuttling down the sheer facades of buildings to spoil the day of the various characters. This is the first Quiet Place I've seen in a cinema and this may be why it seemed to me to a tenser and scarier affair than the two main-sequence films so far. There's a sense in which it is the apotheosis of the quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-LOUD school of genre film-making, but I don't think that really does it justice. It makes some brave and intelligent choices and ends up as being much more than just a franchise-extending adjunct to the other movies in this series: for me, this may be the most impressive Quiet Place so far.

Also Showing, But In A Different Room. . .

. . . Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness, which is another very odd film to release in the middle of summer – an anthology triptych of grotesque short comedies, all delivered by the same cast (many of whom have worked with the director before) but only loosely linked in narrative terms. Jesse Plemons plays a man whose wealthy benefactor (Willem Dafoe) abandons him when one of his requests is just too extreme, then a cop who believes his wife (Emma Stone) has been replaced by a double; in the final episode Stone plays a member of a cult searching for a woman with the power to raise the dead.

'I just don't get how someone can make a film like that,' said someone on the way out of the screening I attended, and not in tones of awed admiration. At least they stayed to the end. Well, it's Yorgos Lanthimos, of course it's a bit weird. Still, at its best, Kinds of Kindness is very watchable, mainly due to some strong performances – Jesse Plemons is particularly good throughout – and arrestingly odd ideas. It says something about this film when the segment about prophecy and the resurrection of the dead is the most naturalistic one; only the middle episode, which is slippery and horrific and impossible to properly pin down, is essentially incomprehensible. Not for everyone – not for most people, and to be honest probably not for me – but there is considerable intelligence and skill on display here.

Awix

08.07.24 Front Page

Back Issue Page