A Quiet Place is a smart, scary little shocker that uses restraint in the area of sound to enhance its visual horrors. Give or take the score, the odd whisper and the occasional blood-curdling roar, John Krasinski’s film deals in cinema’s most underused commodity: silence. This will be music to the ears of anyone overwhelmed by the cacophonous use of sound in modern film, but there is a narrative reason too: the movie is set in a world terrorised by blind carnivorous monsters with acute hearing. The only way to avoid their gnashing jaws and lunging talons is to keep shtum. Communication between the main characters – a family of five hiding in an underground shelter – is conducted chiefly through sign language, lending a small advantage to the eldest child, Regan, who happens, like the actor playing her (Millicent Simmonds), to be deaf. It’s as if the whole world has come round to Regan’s way of hearing things, or rather not hearing them.
The scenario is the inverse of that in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, also starring Simmonds, this time as the deaf runaway Rose. She appears in those sections of the film set in 1927, which are shot, as The Artist was, in the style of a silent movie, accompanied here by Carter Burwell’s busy-bee score. Leaving the cinema one afternoon, Rose notices that the building is closing temporarily to allow newfangled sound equipment to be fitted. The era of the talkie has arrived, putting her cruelly out of sync with the movies she adores.
Both A Quiet Place and Wonderstruck attempt to reverse that alienation process by placing audiences as closely as possible inside the eyes and ears of their deaf characters. That noble aim was achieved most effectively by the 2014 Ukrainian drama The Tribe, set in a boarding school for deaf-mute adolescents and performed entirely in sign language without subtitles. Deprived of auditory cues, the non-deaf viewer has to fight to gain purchase on the meaning of each scene; the only sounds are the thump of fists against chests or palms slapping palms as signing hands flutter like flightless birds. Some of the film’s surprises could not have occurred in a hearing context, such as the weirdly subdued road accident in which the victims’ deafness renders them oblivious to danger – an “It’s behind you!” moment echoed in the scene in A Quiet Place when Regan fails to hear a monster approaching. Being blind, it is unaware of her presence also.
The absence of music and spoken dialogue in The Tribe enriches expressiveness rather than denuding it, so that what appears to be a deficit is repositioned as a gain. Not a bad philosophy for a film selling disability in a largely able-bodied world. But cinema need not address the issue of deafness in order to use quietness revealingly. It rather came with the territory in the case of Into Great Silence. This lengthy and watchful documentary about Carthusian monks in a monastery in the French Alps was never likely to produce a spin-off soundtrack of wall-to-wall bangers. But it was still ear-opening to witness how the general hush changed the dynamic inside the cinema auditorium, engendering in audiences a mood of reverence and reflection that mirrored the monks on screen.
Any picture that pares back dialogue and sound can’t help but make audiences sensitive to their own contribution to noise levels in the cinema. Watching A Quiet Place, where suspense can be heightened simply by the noise of a lamp being knocked over, we become conscious of our own bodily sound effects: the coughs and sniffs, the growls of an empty stomach. In an age where ceaseless conversation and rustling wrappers compete with trilling phones for the title of Most Irritating Interruption in a Motion Picture, the quiet film demands quiet, in turn, from the viewer. It will be an ignorant cinemagoer indeed who carries on munching popcorn throughout Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron, in which a mute relationship develops between an abused wife and a loner who breaks into unoccupied apartments; or the whimsical rustic comedy Le Quattro Volte, where the closest thing to dialogue is the bleating of goats. What that film has in abundance is sight gags that send laughter rippling softly through the cinema. One painstakingly choreographed set-piece involving a timber truck, a yapping dog, a Christian pageant and, yes, goats, is a particular joy to watch with a crowd. As audience members foresee the situation’s slapstick consequences at differing speeds, the effect is like hearing a series of pennies dropping all around the cinema.
As this suggests, quiet cinema is best appreciated with an audience. That is one of its sweetest qualities: the use of quiet intensifies the visual experience, but also makes you aware of your fellow cinemagoers as co-conspirators in the film’s pleasures. Watching Le Quattro Volte, Playtime, Sylvain Chomet’s animations Belleville Rendezvous and The Illusionist, or Roy Andersson’s macabre compilations of comic tableaux beginning with Songs from the Second Floor, we are all savouring the joke together in near-silence, cognisant of one another’s reactions. The relative quiet on screen heightens the responsibility on the audience to be commensurately hushed. If it’s working right, a quiet film should have the same effect on potentially noisy viewers as an almighty “shhh!”
The contrast between sound and silence can under special circumstances become a gag in itself. There is nothing in the whole of Mel Brooks’s 1976 Silent Movie as witty as the idea of giving the script’s one spoken word (“Non!”) to the mime artist Marcel Marceau. And there was an accidental joke when Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson is seen but rarely heard, opened in the UK immediately after Spike Jonze’s Her, where she is heard but never seen. Glazer knows well the power of wordlessness, as you would expect from the director who created in a mute two-minute shot of Nicole Kidman in Birth one of the most insightful close-ups in all cinema. Though he wrings plenty of menace in Under the Skin from disorienting sound design and an unnerving score by Mica Levi, he also allows whole scenes to be soundtracked by nothing more than the sound of Johansson breathing.
That’s only right for a movie so indebted to 2001: A Space Odyssey, that example of quiet cinema which towers like a monolith over any filmmaker seeking to deploy sound with subtlety. Kubrick’s film, celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, is bookended by two dialogue-free stretches of around 25 minutes each. Elsewhere, speech is sparse and sound muted, as it should be in a movie set mostly in space. Pixar’s WALL-E, another 2001-influenced example of quiet cinema, lasts for almost 40 minutes with scarcely any dialogue, though it forfeits some of its enchanting mystery once the action switches to a space station where humans converse in drably familiar American English.
Wonderstruck acknowledges the supremacy of 2001 by featuring on its soundtrack Deodato’s 1973 jazz-funk version of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the stirring Strauss composition that is now forever associated with Kubrick’s film. But for anyone who needs convincing further that 2001 was ahead of its time in the exploration of sound in cinema, consider this: what does the eerily-voiced computer HAL 9000 prove he can do in his big scene, the one everyone remembers, with its daring point-of-view shot from his perspective as he watches the astronauts plotting against him? That’s right: HAL can read lips.
A Quiet Place and Wonderstruck are on release
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