A Quiet Place: Day One

A Quiet Place: Day One

Director ~ Michael Sarnoski

Writers ~ Michael Sarnoski, John Krasinski, Bryan Woods

2024, US-UK

Stars ~ Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff

Decent enough and executed well, but a sequel that doesn’t follow the magic ingredient of the originals: prolonged set pieces with monsters. Rather, we get a downbeat narrative led by Deathwish Pizza and anxiety more for a cat than the characters. Came for the monsters and set pieces, but Sarnoski offers a different beast, and that’s commendable enough except it doesn’t seem to realise that all the prior plot holes were forgiven by those set pieces. Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn are strong leads, making it work; the former bringing sadness and dignity to her fatalism and the latter especially bringing an authentic portrayal of a man guided by fear and general decency rather than machismo.

As our investment is in a lead character that is terminally ill, our concern isn’t if but when and how. It becomes not so much about survival, but rather her obstinacy to get a pizza slice across town to recreate happier memories before checking out: it all hinges on whether she gets there. Her fatalism makes her contrarian, and yet she still struggles to stay alive for her pizza moment. Justin Clark writes that it morphs into “a bittersweet tale of what it’s like to genuinely and fully live with a death sentence.” But there’s no evidence of “fully living” when the character is simply surviving an apocalypse, surely. So then it becomes about choosing your moment to die, but this doesn’t quite fit with a monster movie scenario. Or rather, this isn’t the film to unearth a new angle on the subgenre with that mandate. It mostly retreats into movie sentimentality. The alien invasion becomes a manifestation of a fear of death at any moment, or wanting to see the world burn when the terminal illness leaves you with only sadness and anger.

I may go along with the pizza motivation, but I myself am not convinced by the cat: survives near-drowning twice; turns up when narratively convenient, sometimes just disappears; seems atypically unskittish; and I am certain the anarchic, random and wilfully selfish behaviour that cats are known for would have gotten someone, if not everyone, killed. (Indeed, we’ve seen Eric trying to silently, painfully remove a package from a display and that’s the moment that the cat chooses to do its feline jump scare with a loud thud that has no consequences, even though just the ripping of clothing has been shown to summon the aliens). It seems resolutely unbothered by the presence of giant aliens which it would surely catapult away from or rub against, depending upon its mood. Maybe service cats are different. Maybe service cats don’t meow or make noise. Whatever, that is where any cat lover’s anxiety will be.

And if you came for answers to the aliens, or any illumination on their invasion or day one, there isn’t that either. Like the ‘Planet of the Apes’ franchise, ‘A Quiet Place’ has taken a turn for the miserabilism, meaning this is a little low on the fun and thrills to balance the fear and despair.

The Vast of Night

 

Andrew Patterson

2019, USA

Written by Andrew Patterson & Craig W. Sanger

 

‘The Vast of Night’ is one of those films that subsists on mood and build-up, slow burn character and understatement. This means it won’t appeal to those expecting a more visceral and frightening alien encounter: its works more from the eerie-uncanny angle. It’s like a Robert Altman film mixed with a Fifties no-budget b-movie. And it occasionally pretends to be an episode of some Sixties sci-fi spooker. Indeed, we’re in the realms of ‘The Outer Limits’’ first episode ‘The Galaxy Being’, with something weird being picked up on the airwaves, or microwaves, or whatever… 

The evocation of one night in New Mexico 1950s Americana where the town’s majority are at a baseball game is sumptuous: this is wonderful period stuff that  feels nostalgically right. Straight away, it’s socially busy with our nerdy protagonists talking a mile-a-minute. Our central protagonists are Fay Crocker and Everett Sloan, played so engagingly by Sierra Miller and Jake Horowitz, she with thorough nerdy charm and gusto and he with a just a hint of macho jerky overconfidence in conflict with natural goodness. He is a local radio DJ and she’s a sixteen-year-old switch-board operator who loves to talk about the tremendous scientific developments that will dazzle the future. And one of the treats is how their relationship is of friendship, as kindred spirits, rather than romantic. 

It is quite an audacious opening, throwing the viewer right into the milieu of retro-atmospherics, lengthy gliding takes, constant chatter between characters who know each other already and we’ll just have to keep up. The talk is witty, always conveying character, packed with information, realistic and casual, smart and a delight. And beautifully played. The talk is as wall-to-wall as a play – script Andrew Patterson & Craig W. Sanger - but Patterson’s direction – showy without being disruptive – is wholly cinematic. There are gorgeous wide-screen compositions. As Adam Nayman notes, “The technical proficiency of Patterson’s debut is off the charts.” (Although I would say he credits the Spielberg influence too much: talky humanism and UFO scares were a thing before ‘Close Encounters’.)

Then there is a long-take of Faye working the switchboard and hearing an odd noise and trying to investigate further. Then there is a second long-take where the camera glides from one side town to the other, via going through the basketball game. I am a sucker for such long-takes: the first allows Miller to act her retro glasses off as she talks to various people, pulling and plugging connections on the switchboard, trying to work on the mystery whilst tied to the switchboard and radio. The second long-take is that kind of camerawork and trickery that always pleases me, the bonus being that it has a world-building purpose (here’s the town; here’s where they are geographically from one another). If the latter errs on the side of indulgence, it’s fully congruous to this mood-piece.

 

The pacing is a rush to figure out what’s happening, a chase. That sets the momentum, giving energy to an otherwise very talky show. There's a perpetual tension that keeps rolling through, even when it stops for compelling story-telling. And all of this leads to a place where they walk right into tragedy and horror. Despite the fun of the retro-sci-fi aliens-above-us, the film is always underpinned by tragedy, right from Billy (Bruce Davis) calling in with his story, through the tale of a child abduction and to the notations of the empty spaces left behind as the town finally comes out of the game. It may be busy on the surface, but it's creepy too.

‘The Vast of Night’ is a treat of a script, performance and characterisation. A wonderful homage to UFO sci-fi with impeccable mood and with just enough bite to accentuate a grounded sadness and terror. It’s jazzy, assured, has a clear love of storytelling, and ultimately haunting.

Phase IV

Saul Bass, 1974, UK-USA

Screenplay – Mayo Simon

I was always convinced Adam Ant was inspired by this, Saul Bass’ only film, to write ‘Ants Invasion’. Even as a kid, I was sure this had to be the case. 

Watching the short film, ‘Bass on Titles’, it’s obvious how much an influence and pioneer Bass was. It’s no wonder his name is renowned in cinema, if for only contributing title sequences and ‘Psycho’s shower scene. Even in his short film ‘Quest’ (1984) – an adaption of one of Ray Bradbury’s futuristic stories fuelled by nostalgia for what we were – it is obvious that however dated and budget-restrained the effects are, Bass never lets it feel lacking, knows how to shoot and frame, and strikes up memorable visuals. (It has a nice Eighties feel – hair is quite bouffant in the future – and even a cameo from Noah Hathaway apparently on his way to ‘The Neverending Story’). Indeed, a recurring motif throughout Bass’ short films is the tiny human profile or silhouette against a gargantuan backdrop.

Which makes ‘Phase IV’, a screenplay by Mayo Simon about ant behaviour eventually overwhelming mankind, quite the logical extension. These are normal-sized ants altered and advanced by an electromagnet phenomenon from space; which means if you come for giant bugs, you’ll be disappointed – although the original promotion was full of the hyperbole associated with giant bug features (“The day the earth was turned into a cemetery! Ravenous invaders controlled by a terror out in space … commanded to annihilate the world!”). Bass’ films do agreeably posit an objective angle that man is exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things and always learning. Bass’ first short, ‘The Searching Eye’ (1964) has knowledge as an empty beach upon which a child searches and plays, which opens all kinds of cosmic reflections. His second, ‘Why Man Creates’ (1968) is like a kind of ‘Sesame Street’ for adults, trying to break down man’s passion for creativity, at first playful and then lapsing into pontification: the best sequence is the animated opener portraying the towering pile-up of mankind’s development. This existential rumination carries over from Bass’ short films to his feature, where humanity and the individual are dwarfed by forces and concepts much, much bigger, abstract, and existential.  

‘Phase IV’ is distinguished by its remarkable and up-close footage of these ants – Dick Bush’s cinematography is mesmerising (he did ‘Sorcerer’). As Douglas Buck writes: 

"Watching individual hive ants, through microphotography doing things you almost can’t believe you’re seeing, such as, for instance, carry a piece of the poisonous ‘yellow chemical’ rained down on them by the scientists (killing most of them) through their underground tunnels, one at a time (as each ant dies, another picks it up and carries it until it then dies from exposure, then the next and the next) all the way to the large queen, who ingests it, then gives birth to new evolutionary-progressed yellow chemical-resistant ants, is just one of the number of jaw-dropping scenes where it feels almost like the tiny little critters are giving performances."

The desert setting gives a dominant orange, sun-baked hue; the ants crawling out of corpses provides considerable squirm-inducing content and a foremost image for the film, although the monoliths are equally striking. The music is prog-rock with flying saucer synth. Yes, ‘2001: a space odyssey’ with ants, complete with monoliths, and even moreso with the original ending now available. It brings the malevolent cosmic to Earth in a way that is firstly deceptively mundane – like ‘The Midwhich Cuckoos’ or ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’ – working on a scale that initially isn’t quite viewable to casual human observation, just some oddness. Ants. Even crop circles. And they all centre on the fear of being colonised by something superior and unknowable.

The voice-overs help to dive into the story straight away without

too much exposition. Some of this was apparently studio-imposed, but here it does not feel detrimental. Similarly, the archetypes of a slightly jaded young scientist (Michael Murphy) and the older slightly wayward scientist (Nigel Davenport) are quickly identifiable, so that we get to themes and concepts first rather than back-story, and it is these that predominate. It is the tale of how a couple of humans lose against the uprising of and colonisation by the evolution of ants. These are, mostly untypical of the genre, scientists out of their depth (which bears a little iconoclasm that I always favour). I disagree with Martyn Auty that “the ants get the works from the special effects department, and original ideas (so often a casualty in sci-fi cinema) take a back seat.” There’s an editing technique and use of juxtapositions, an overall tone that is akin to Nic Roeg where the associations the brain naturally makes from a gallery of random images creates heftier, intuitive meaning and interpretations. It is an observant, objective rather than subjective approach. These characters do not overcome the odds simply by force of humankind’s innate superiority. And yet, the ending is as transcendent as it is downbeat.

Studio demands meant the original trippier ending of a vision of the ants’ plans for humankind was cropped, but it’s been salvaged and available now. Before, it ended with Lesko (Murphy) narrating that the ants had shown them their future plans and we were to take his word for it, and leaving it to our imaginations did no harm, if it seemed a bit abrupt. But with this longer ending we too see that vision and it’s no disappointment. It’s like a montage of science-fiction novel covers. Overlapping imagery, surrealism; quick cuts: this longer finale slips into Bass’ montage style familiar from his credits work and short films. For example, there’s tiny people running through a mazes and across diant colours; and the sunset and sunrise imagery that is strong in ‘Phase IV’ is a recurring motif in his shorts (indeed, one is called ‘The Solar Film’ (1980)).

The reason why ‘Phase IV’ lingers is that is carries with it an eeriness, that uncanny quality that haunts, by evoking something like the cosmic uncanniness and unknowability that HP Lovecraft favoured as the centre of horror. It’s heady, pulpy and over-reaching in the best way of Seventies sci-fi.

Bass’s assured sense of the visual and of a slight obliqueness of narrative makes it a shame that he didn’t make further films as it’s likely he would have made more cult favourites.