My first movie in a theater since, you know. I was an audience of one, which was bizarre, but that was the opposite of frightening, pandemically speaking. There were so many trailers, including personal appeals from actors (Selma Hayek, John Krasinski) to the movie going public (me) to go to more movies.
Inexplicable monsters have come from somewhere and now rule the earth, because they can. These monsters are blind, unlike dragons, but do have super sensitive hearing instead. They resemble “signal crayfish”, a species invasive to the Thames River, threatening the native “white-claw” variety. Krasinski (the director) says he got his monster idea from the film Rocknrolla (2008) where the crayfish invasion story makes a cameo appearance in a torture scene.
An intrepid Emily Blunt, widowed at the end of Act One (A Quiet Place, 2018), is left to wander western New York State with three children and a guitar amplifier.
Her daughter (Millicent Simmonds, the only native-born American in a heroic role) is deaf, so what dialogue there is, is very very quiet, but there are many opportunities to brush up on your ASL, or wish you had.
Emily and her daughter, son, and infant (in a box and needing oxygen) follow a fire signal to a defunct Bethlehem Steel Plant in Lackawana NY, facing Lake Erie. The male lead, an Irishman (Cillian Murphy), is hiding there from the crayfish-monsters.
Emily is English by birth, and so naturally she and Cillian don’t get along. There is not much to do while hiding from an invasive species, so they pass the time listening to a radio station broadcasting “Beyond the Sea” (Bobby Darin, 1959) on repeat. In a heroic turn, Millicent, the daughter, sets off alone to find the source of the broadcast on an enchanted island (similar to the Arthurian Avalon) beyond the Lake Erie coast. Here she will be safe, because the monsters never had swimming lessons.
Emily shames the Cillian into following the deaf daughter to bring her back to the steel plant. Instead, when he finds her, they go together to the island refugium by boat, after an interval with mute zombies-que survivors, who seem to be in the wrong movie. One dragon-monster drowns in pursuit, but another follows them to this latter-day “Avalon” in a boat.
At this point the only (or most) interesting thing about the movie happens: horrifying scenes at the steel plant and on the island are shown simultaneously on a split screen. The sailing monster disembarks and runs amok on the island, while a second finds the steel-plant hidey-hole, until both are slain by the power of feedback (Jimi Hendrix would have been so proud) and a few well aimed blows to their inner ears.
A “Quiet Place—part three” is in the offing, but what’s the point? Are humans the indigenous species brought to the edge of extinction by an invasion of faster, stronger, better killers, even if they are somewhat pointless? Are the monsters symbolic the Covid-19 virus, from which we have been hiding, but against whom we now are inoculating ourselves with feedback? Are the monsters MAGA-men without their hats, still trying to lead the American Steel industry back to its heyday? Are we the monsters? We just keep killing ourselves better, with ever more monstrous weapons and ideologies, after all. Will Millicent Simmonds become the lady of the lake, or the Lady of Shallott, and all the monsters become dragons? Will Emily turn out to be the hero of her own life after all?
