A Quiet Place is a chilling but riveting film that delivers
a fresh twist on the horror genre.
Yippee Ki-yay movie lovers, its Jan here and today I’m breaking down the ending
to
A Quiet Place, plus explaining some details you probably didn’t know about the creatures
in the movie. Spoiler warning, I’ll be discussing the whole movie, so take care
if you’ve not seen it
yet.
A Quiet Place is set in
a near future in which an alien invasion has decimated swathes of the human
population around the world. The creatures have super-sensitive hearing and so
survivors like the Abbotts live as quietly as possible.
This is why John Krasinski’s character Lee puts down sand
trails to muffle sounds while walking and everyday life has been completely
adapted to dampen any sound. The monsters are blind, so visual signals are an
important way for the human characters to communicate. And because the family
have a deaf daughter, they have been able to use the American Sign Language
they learned with her to talk silently with each other.
Ok, let’s take a look at the alien creatures and why they attack anything
making a sound.
Design-wise the aliens are rather interesting – they’re
different from but do bring to mind other creatures like the Demogorgon in
Stranger Things, the xenomorphic in the Alien movies, the monster in Clover
field, and the crazy sharp teeth you see with Venom. The films production
designer Jeffrey Beecroft has said that he took inspiration for the alien’s
form from a Nautilus shell.
The nautilus is a type of sea creature that has very poor
eyesight although A Quiet Place dials that up, making the aliens completely blind.
By the way, there are various newspaper clippings which
describe the aliens as either Death
Angels or Angels of Death which is interesting because, in the Jewish
tradition, the archangel Samael is known as the angel of death and is sometimes
referred to as the blind god as well.
And the aliens really do seem to be the bringers of death,
but Lee has been researching them extensively and on his white board we can see
the main things he knows about them. One thing he’s still trying to figure out
is the answer to the question Why don’t they– I think that says – eat their kill?
Although the movie doesn’t seem to touch on this in an obvious manner,
production designer Jeffrey Beecroft has explained that when loud sound
vibrates inside [the aliens body], its intensely painful and they will destroy
anything that makes noise. And we do see them pulsating and thrashing around
when they’re faced with a big sound. Which means the real reason why the
creatures attack anything making a loud noise isn’t for sport or for food –
instead, it seems like they’re trying to eliminate [loud] sounds in the
environment around them. And, of course, as the family eventually discovers,
although the alien’s hypersensitivity to sound makes them deadly to life on
earth, its actually their weakness as well. And that makes Lees efforts to
develop a working hearing aid for his daughter Regan, played by Millicent
Simmonds, the key to the story. The new hearing aid he gives her doesn’t work
properly and creates a high-pitched sound that is not only uncomfortable to
her, but is also unbearable to the creatures when they’re nearby.
It seems likely that because the aliens are blind, they rely
on a sort of echolocation, or bio sonar to emit soundwaves that they can track
to navigate and hunt. These soundwaves create audio feedback when they hit the
amplifiers in Regan’s hearing aid and, because of the creature’s audio
hypersensitivity, the amplified feedback sound ends up being extremely painful
for the aliens.
Now, when you watched the movie you may have been hoping
that Regan knew this when she and her brother were hiding in the car as it
could have saved their father, but at that moment she didn’t understand that
the hearing aids audio feedback was affecting the aliens. When it happened the
first earlier, the alien was behind her in the corn field and although we could
hear the creature rustling, because Regan is deaf, she had no idea it was behind
her – all she could feel was the uncomfortable pitch from the feedback loop
right by her
head. And when Regan and her brother were in the silo, although she also felt
the feedback she didn’t realise that was the reason the creature ran off.
It’s not until Regan is in the basement with her mother and they are confronted
with an alien that suddenly goes into an uncontrollable spasm that Regan
understands her hearing aid has uncovered the monster’s weakness. But the
feedback doesn’t kill the creature and it comes back at them. However, its head
is exposed as it opens up so Evelyn kills it with a shotgun blast to the face.
This leads us to the very final moment of the movie where Evelyn and Regan
realise what they have to do. As the remaining aliens come running to the
farmhouse attracted by the noise of the gun, Regan and Evelyn have the hearing
aid, speaker and shotgun at the ready. According to Lees white board there
should be two creatures left in the area, so it should be possible for them to take
them both out.
The wider world might also recover if the discovery can be
relayed to others so that sound-based weapons can be developed to take down the
alien invasion. By the way, the idea of being pregnant during this apocalyptic
time is interesting both
in terms of the plot and for what it symbolises.
Obviously, it creates a huge problem as not only is giving birth in total
silence impossible, but a new-born baby will also naturally cry out.
To cope with this, the family builds a special basement area
with a box for the baby complete with an oxygen tank. The underground room is
covered with a mattress which seems to muffle sounds coming from below enough
to keep any creatures from detecting them.
The birth was actually supposed to take place in this room
but, of course, Evelyn was forced to give birth in the bathroom while she was
hiding from the alien invading the house. Symbolically, Evelyn’s pregnancy and
birth signals hope for their family and the future of the world and you can
also see this in the fact that, despite their terrible situation, Evelyn tries
to move forward by home-schooling her children and both parents try to maintain
their spirits with family dinners and board games. This indicates that the
Abbot family is trying to thrive, not just survive, during this nightmarish
time.
By the way, the scene where Evelyn is in the flooded
basement with the baby is an interesting call-back to earlier in the film where
Lee showed his son Marcus how the sound of the waterfall would mask noises they
made.
The sound of the water in the flooding basement muffled some
of the sound of the whimpering baby, but Evelyn took herself and the baby
behind a sheet of falling water as the baby started to cry and just like with
the waterfall, the noise of the falling water was enough to drown out the baby’s
crying.
So, did you enjoy A Quiet Place and what did you think about
the creatures? Also, would you like to see follow-up stories set in this
universe, along the lines of the
Clover field movies?
No comments:
Post a Comment