A Quiet Strength in A Quiet Place

It was nice to be back in a theater again getting to see a movie which I was planning to see on my birthday back in March of 2020 before everything decided to hit the fan. There was something special getting to see it with friends who have helped, in their own particular ways, keep each other sane during this past year. Things seem to be slowly coming back to normal, and as they do, I find myself increasingly thankful for the people who demonstrate that even the most abnormal seasons are worthwhile.

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It did not take John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” long to find good reception among an assortment of different audiences. While it markets itself as a horror film, many have found that it does not quite check that box. It is an apocalyptic family film which somehow manages to be both wholesome and frightening in equal parts. And while the modern, apocalyptic genre often reeks of nihilism, A Quiet Place concerns itself with an unsuspecting and upside-down virtue of quiet self-sacrificial strength.

Regan, the family’s daughter played by Millicent Simmonds, is deaf in a world where making any noise may result in almost instant death by quadrupedal creatures who hunt with their super-sensitive hearing. Her father, Lee (John Krasinski), is driven to helping her regain her sense of hearing but who ultimately fails to do so—but not without helping provide the tool necessary to expose the ultimate weakness of the predators who have sent them into a life of quiet terror.

One might suspect in a world falling apart that the way to survive is the way of brute force, yet what we find in this movie’s moral fabric is that one’s weaknesses may in fact be a conduit for strength and that survival for survival’s sake is ultimately a dead-end. Like in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”, the question is posed: what is the point of surviving if there are not still some of us who “carry the fire”? Apocalypse may mean, in a classical sense, an unveiling, but in this film what is unveiled is the surprising moral fortitude of each member of the Abbott family.

Some have commented about the strikingly “pro-living” message of the film in that a baby is joyfully conceived in a world in which having a loud, screaming baby might very well be a death-sentence. It costs each member of this family something to care for this child, but it is a task each one takes up hopefully and in earnest. To have a child in a world seemingly falling apart requires its own quiet strength. And to lay down one’s life in the ordinary routine of life often suggests that one may just be willing to lay down one’s own life even unto death.

A Quiet Place Part 2—while I will try to keep this as spoiler free as possible—takes up exactly where the first film leaves off. The family attempts to survive with one less member but who are still as animated by the virtues of love and self-sacrifice that their father sought to embody. Each bears an even greater load with the loss, and a new character, Emmett (Cilian Murphy), is introduced. Emmett is broken by his own set of losses and has given in to the sort of cynicism and despair one might naturally conclude is only sensible in such a world as theirs. Interestingly, it is Regan and Emmett who make the sequel as emotionally resonant as the first film.

The silent strength of the family (but particularly Regan) has an almost infectious effect on Emmett who in his own isolation of self-survival is reminded that there are indeed people still worth saving even at tremendous risk to himself. The virtue of self-sacrifice is not exclusive to family, but perhaps is demonstrated even more profoundly in a bond without such innately expected loyalty.

The quiet strength of this family is slowly but surely cultivated, and in the film’s fitting conclusion, the hope of this virtue, the fruit of this faithful family, is shown to be boldly carried forth. I hope I don’t give away too much when I say that Lee would certainly be proud.

A Quiet Place Part 2 proves itself to be a worthy sequel. It does what any good sequel should do: it complements and helps reach conclusions of the first film without betraying the moral, logical, or emotional consistency of the original. While I am not entirely convinced there is room for a Part 3, I would be lying if I told you I wouldn’t still be excited for it.

1917 and the Ruin of Beautiful Things

“We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace.” St. Augustine

1917 is a brutal and beautiful film. The shots of falling cherry-blossoms complemented by the terrific lighting contrast scenes of corpses integrated seamlessly into the landscape. Acts of mercy are met with violence. Blood is spilled in acts of self-survival and milk is given in acts of self-sacrifice. The fire of the sun touches gently on rolling green pastures and the inferno of war bears down like a hellscape on a quaint French village.

War films have a way of disturbing me far more than any horror film. Perhaps it is how close war films can come to reality that unsettles me. One can sit at a comfortable distance from evil in a horror film, but a war film requires us to reckon with the evil in human history. I take it as a good rule of thumb: don’t trust a war film that doesn’t unsettle you.

War often takes place in beautiful places and brings to ruin beautiful things—friendships, fraternity, creatures, and culture. Some have argued that 1917’s aesthetic  trivializes the brutality of war, I’d argue it does the very opposite. The film produces something uncanny in the way that it constantly flips back and forth between scenes of awe and scenes of horror and then sometimes blends the two together (so much so, I almost stepped out of the theater for some reprieve). I imagine that this was intentional on the director’s part perhaps wanting the audience to recognize that war does not just take place in hellish landscapes, it takes place in villages, among livestock, and with the sun illuminating everything to reveal both the former beauty and barbarism of battlegrounds. War takes place between humans even when everything seems inhumane.

1917 is about ruin and the preservation of beauty. It is about what we have that we lose in war, but it is also about why war is often necessary to preserve what is beautiful. It rides a hard line of showing the complexity of war, and it shows that sometimes we must choose destruction for the sake of peace and preservation.

I have a quote framed in my room that simply states “as long as we have our stories there is hope.” Sentimental as it may sound, there is a truth to it. We tell to each other stories to help us make sense of our lives and the evil within it. And these stories can continue to provide hope long often after their author is gone. In this sin-soaked and absurd world of ours, sometimes all we are left with is fragments of the beauty that once was, but we can certainly continue to fight for the cultivation and preservation of beauty that still is.

Toy Story 4 Review: Who(se) Am I?

The Toy Story series has an interesting philosophical premise in which you can’t separate a toy’s purpose from its creator/owner. What gives the toy its value is not what it is made of or where it came from but by and for whom it was made. And that resonates.

The latest installment to the series is certainly the most existential of the bunch. Take for example the main character, Forky—a preschool arts-and-crafts project literally made from trash. Forky is given life by being created and named by Bonnie (the new owner of the toys from the previous iterations), and he finds himself wondering throughout the film whether he belongs to the trash or belongs to Bonnie. Is his central purpose connected to that which he was made fromor for whom he was made? He feels at ease in trashcans and dumpsters and with other garbage, but is this his purpose?

Toy Story 4 cares less about the question of “Why are we here?” and more about the question “Whose are we?” But at times,  it doesn’t know how to answer its own question.

What do you do with toys whose owners no longer care for them? What do you do with those who have never had an owner to begin with? Won’t all toys eventually be forgotten? Will not all of them inevitably end up on the Island of Misfit Toys?

These are terrifying questions, and some of the most joyful and most depressing moments in this film revolve around toys finding (or not finding) an owner.

What’s a toy’s purpose with no owner? A toy is inherently created to be loved and enjoyed, so what do you do with that missing variable? Can a toy be a toy without an owner, or does it then become an antique? You could ask the same question of us, what are we without a relationship to our creator—can we find purpose aside from it? Can we fill the void of creator-creature love with creature-creature love?

Again, this film brings up huge questions and doesn’t quite know how to answer them all, but it does try its best.

Without giving too much away, the ending attempts to persuade its audience that a toy can find meaning after its owner while still recognizing that a toy’s most noble purpose is being there for a child. It can barely make up its mind though. On one hand, it makes it clear that it is better for a toy to be with an owner, yet on the other it can’t just say that toys without an owner are “trash” (as the film describes as being “Useless. Like your purpose has been fulfilled”). In some ways it does seem to say that creature-creature love can fill the void, but I wasn’t convinced.

The ending feels hollow to me. I’d like for every toy to have an owner, and for them to have one forever. I guess I’m just glad to not be some human’s play-thing, and I’m glad I don’t have to work with the assumption that my creator might one day just leave me out to dry leaving me to try to make sense of a life without him.

 

 

Annihilation and Creation

“It’s destroying everything.”
“It’s not destroying, it’s making something new.”

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Perhaps one of the most stunning and enigmatic films out in theaters this year is Alex Garland’s Annihilation. If you haven’t seen it yet, I should warn you that this post will contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it already and you’re the sort of person that digs mind-bending Sci-Fi you should quit reading this and go see it before it leaves theaters. Honestly, I wish I could dedicate this whole post to describing how aesthetically stunning (and terrifying) the film is in the hopes that I will convince you to see it, but I will refrain. Anyways, here’s my shot at interpreting what is going on in Annihilation. 

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If it wasn’t made so obviously clear from the trailers, there is something seriously wrong in the world of Annihilation. But as the film begins, before we are even clued into the apocalyptic events that are currently unfolding, we are immediately thrust into considering that at a biological level we are constantly changing, mutating, and tearing ourselves apart. Both on a fundamental level and on the surface, humanity’s tendency towards self-destruction seems to be a steady theme within the story, whether it be the conscious decision of certain character or a more insidious sort of self-destruction. However, I don’t think that self-destruction is solely what this film is about.

The amount of times within the dialogue of this film that the words “I don’t know” are repeated is almost maddening, but don’t put it past the director, he knows exactly what he is doing in making this film so ambiguous and so frustratingly vague at certain points.

This film is not attempting to teach a lesson of how the world is birthed from chaos and will eventually return to chaos. It certainly wouldn’t disagree with the notion that part of the fabric of reality is chaotic, but I think it’s important to see that this film holds up a striking tension between the violent and destructive nature of reality and the beautiful and creative elements to our world. Like Kane and Lena’s conversation about God and the world we live in, the writer isn’t so confident to totally discredit Kane’s views that there is something good about the world, there is beauty, yes, but there is also (as Lena recognizes) tragedy seemingly written into the core of it.

The glimmer itself is mutating and horribly mangling things but at the same time it is revealed that it is not attempting to destroy our world but attempting to make something new out of it. Simultaneously there is destruction and creation at work. Within the glimmer is a nightmarish landscape of beauty, violence, and works of art birthed from destruction. Like the exploded corpse which created an oddly entrancing and kaleidoscopic array of fungi, this film attempts to persuade us that at the nature of reality is both a destruction which leads to creation and a creation which leads to destruction.

Unlike many other Science Fiction films, this film is not about alien life coming to destroy the Earth. It’s perhaps more haunting than that. As Lena (Natalie Portman) discovers after fighting to push forward to the center of the glimmer, there’s a strange creator at work who she comes face to face with. After discovering the video footage of her husband Kane committing suicide and talking to what seems to be a glimmer-produced clone of himself, Lena herself enters into the bowels of the glimmer’s nerve center. There she finds her team leader, Dr. Ventress, whose own annihilation releases a beautiful explosion of color and glimmer(?) as her old self decomposes and utterly decays. Lena herself then meets this other creator. As a part of Lena is fused with some other aspect of this creator, a duplicate is formed. While Lena attempts to escape her duplicate, she is forced to reckon with her duplicate as it suffocates, fights, and mimics her every movement. It is perhaps one of the most terrifying and troubling scenes in the whole film, and one in which most of us can relate: trying to flee from the destruction evident in our lives only to be forced back into it by none other than our own self.

After passing out for an undisclosed amount of time, Lena’s duplicate slowly moves her toward Kane’s old bag which contains another grenade of the same variety in which he used to kill himself. Here’s where things get confusing. The duplicate slowly begins to match Lena’s details. She becomes an exact replica of Lena not only matching her movements but her physical appearance and even her psychological attributes. The original Lena then gives the duplicate the grenade as she flees the scene.

Now here’s how I interpret it: upon matching the physicality, the appearance, and the psychology of Lena, this “other” Lena inherits her own self-destructive tendencies thus detonating the grenade, destroying the glimmer’s hub, and destroying itself. This other was attempting to create something new, but by fusing itself with what it was altering, it inherited its self-destructive traits thus destroying itself but preserving and restoring the original creation. Thus, humanity’s tendency towards self-destruction leads in a horribly enigmatic way to its own preservation. This whole film exists in tension with itself, especially considering the ending.

Lena and Kane, having been the only two to escape(?) the glimmer, proceed to reengage with each other. Lena asks, perhaps states, to Kane, “You’re not Kane, are you?” to which he quietly replies, “No, I don’t think so.” He then asks Lena the same question to which we get no response, but we do see a strange glimmer within both sets of their eyes.

I don’t think that this should lead us to believe that Lena’s duplicate is the one that escaped and that Lena was the one who self-destructed. To me, that doesn’t seem to lend itself to be cohesive with the rest of the film which is all about embracing the paradoxical nature of reality. It makes more sense to me to see the ending as Lena and Kane’s duplicate embracing each other to begin the start of a new relationship with remnants of the old one. Whereas Lena’s duplicate self-destructed and the original Kane self-destructed, the original Lena and the new Kane find new life and a new relationship.

Lena and (original) Kane’s relationship we see throughout the film was once beautiful, but was then sabotaged by Lena’s affair, and then began to unravel even more. As we see the team that enters into the glimmer slowly unravel, as we see the environment slowly unravel, and as we see even the glimmer itself unravel, it doesn’t unravel itself into nothingness but rather into something new. In this film, destruction does not lead to annihilation but to creation (and then back to destruction and so forth).

I don’t think we are supposed to come out of this film with much of a conclusion for what the glimmer represents. I don’t think it’s fair to even say this is a film about grief or cancer or working through trauma (although I admit much of it certainly addresses that). The glimmer may not represent anything at all but perhaps it is used as a means to expose us to a question about reality: how do we make sense of life when destruction and creation are fundamental to our world? Or rather, what do we do with our simultaneously beautiful and nightmarish condition? And are beauty and destruction dependent on one another? Rather than resigning to despair or presenting a sentimental answer to this sort of question, this film instead attempts to embrace that tension and comes to the humble but frustrating conclusion of: “I don’t know.”

 

A Disease Worse Than Death: A Review of “It Comes at Night”

The modern horror genre often does not leave much up to the imagination when it comes to stirring up fear in its viewers. Whether it be a crazed killer with a machete, a grotesque demonic figure, or a flesh-craving alien, most pop-horror films leave you only a short amount of time until you can see in vivid detail what is wrong and who or what is committing that wrong. Unlike most of these films, Trey Edward Shults’ “It Comes at Night” leaves almost everything up to the imagination, and it is every bit as terrifying  as most pop-horror films without relying on jump-scares to rattle its audience.

The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic world with a disease which is left intentionally vague besides a few details: it is spread through touch and it comes at night. The opening sequences involve the main protagonists—a husband and wife and their son—preparing to euthanize the plagued grandfather of their family. We are told there are probably only a handful of people left in the world, and that those remaining have turned violent and desperate for survival. This family does not take any extra risks of their own survival as evidenced by there only being one way in and out of their carefully boarded-up home. It’s not long before there’s a bump in the night, and something is found lurking in their house. It turns out to be a reasonable and likable man trying to find water for his family. The intruder tells them that his family is 50 miles away and in desperate need of food and water, but something still seems off. Something always seems off in this film—just *off* enough to get under your skin.

From the very beginning til the very end of the film, the fear of the unknown is at the center. There are no ghosts or demons to buffer this fundamentally human fear instead we are left to experience each aching moment of paranoia that these protagonists must deal with in their frightening world.

Many techniques are utilized throughout the film to help produce an atmosphere just haunting enough to leave you emotionally shaken and deeply confused: eerie lighting, visual illusions, maddening dream sequences, oddly-paced dialogue, and claustrophobic, alternating aspect ratios . This is not your normal pop-horror film. You do not get jump-scares—you get dread. You do not get a wholly evil villain—you get people like yourself. You do not get a disturbing answer as much as you get a horrifying silence.

This fear of the unknown is everywhere in this film and in so much of our world today: in strangers, in the dark, in the disease, and in death. There is a real threat though, and it is not a film that pretends there is an easy solution. Distrust, fear, anxiety, and paranoia are understandable responses to the worlds in which we and these protagonists live, but this horror film does not let you naively assume that “survival of the fittest” is an easy pill to swallow. Instead it makes you slowly choke on it. You can board up your house and live in defensive isolation hoping for the extinction of everyone else, but what happens when those inside start to show signs of not only an external disease but of an internal and even more heinous disease?

Self-preservation may get you an extra day or month or year in a diseased world, but it is hard to imagine a life without hospitality, trust, vulnerability, or friendship—however costly these things may be. Is it the length or quality of our lives that matter? “It Comes at Night” simultaneously rejects a sentimental altruism or a glorified egoism. Each character’s decisions come at the expense of their physical life or their own soul. Hospitality may bring a disease inside your home, but Xenophobia may reveal an even more serious disease emerging from within your own house.

There is very little redemption within the universe of this film. In a diseased world, everything dies, and that darkness is coming for each and every one of us. Thankfully from a Christian perspective, the disease doesn’t have the final say. The words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew have been ringing in my head since I watched the film’s sober ending, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” I realize this must bear eternity in mind with the temporal, yet this film has no sense of eternity or afterlife. All that is is what will be and nothing else. Bodies are burned, and no funerals are given.  Death is the end of all things in this film, and it’s everywhere. Without a promise of a resurrection or a world fully restored in the life to come, open doors, open tables, or even open hearts are a risk many may deem not worthy of being taken in light of death’s creeping imminence. 

This film doesn’t pull any punches in revealing the deep fear and anxiety many of us have in making the most of our fragile, little lives especially as it is expressed through humanity’s neurotic control-issues and distrust of the unknown. But in turning in on ourselves and turning toward our own individual survival, we see that these characters are perhaps just as sick as those outside their house despite having much more than most in their world. Ironically, in pursuit of a full life, they had been losing theirs all along. 

“It Comes at Night” is a despairing film but uses that despair to tell us something. Its observations on humanity, survival, and inhospitality hit deeply. And seems to pound its audience with a question repeatedly from beginning til end and even on the car ride home:

Is avoiding what is in the darkness for more life and less love better than embracing what is in the darkness for more love and less life?