Killing for a quiet life

Although I am a happily terrorized fan of John Krasinski’s dystopian films, A quiet place (2018) and A Quiet Place, Part II (2020) has been a question that has haunted me since its premiere. In these first two films, giant man-eating praying mantises descend upon the earth and begin to destroy humanity. They cannot see, so they orient themselves and hunt by sound, with their keen hearing causing them to attack even the slightest noise. But Why do they? That remains a nagging mystery. Hunger? Malice? Revenge? The noise of our open-air concerts and football matches, the traffic on the highways, explosive munitions in Gaza and Ukraine, the mind-numbing hum of our power grid and data mines? The ghastly horror of the first two films unfolds without explanation.

A well-known motif of alien invasion and post-apocalyptic freak-outs such as Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is that these interplanetary attacks come from those who may be escaping hell elsewhere, but also see us as a source of protein. They aren't just hungry; they kill like unstoppable machines of missionary ruthlessness. In fact, the real star of this subgenre might be the bloodbath that ensues, a visual-aural orgy of destruction and a playground for set designers and sound engineers. Across the smoking ruins of a nearly extinct species (ours), it dawns on the scattered survivors that they cannot simply sweep away civilization with buckets and mops. Mass murder also destroys human infrastructure, which must then be abandoned, but not before we and the characters look on in disbelief at the emptying horror of the streets.

In A quiet placethe invaders overrun the earth and only a few smart and lucky people survive. We watch a close-knit family – father Krasinski, mother Emily Blunt (married to each other in real life) and their children (one of whom is hearing impaired) – trying to escape the onslaught until one must die to save the rest. We meet the family of five in Media Resraid an abandoned pharmacy to get medicine and return to their farm. The howling sound of a child's space shuttle attracts a creature from the forest, which carries the youngest boy away in its mouth.

A year later, the Swiss Robinson family is well prepared to fend off the raiders, but still grieves the loss of their son. The “peace” of the “place” is their silent, old-bucolic existence: they are off the grid and barefoot, eating leafy greens and storing corn in a silo, speaking sign language with a whispered pronunciation, and have equipped the farm with warning systems. One of the monsters attacks the farmhouse and a fierce battle ensues. Once a family member sacrifices themselves and the monster is killed, the remaining members burn their stronghold and sneak away.

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The journey continues in A quiet place part II. It begins with a flashback to the arrival of the monsters from the skies above the family's small town during an idyllic Little League game. The story then jumps forward to the end of the first film, where we find the family, with a newborn, searching for safety. There is no philosophical depth to day-to-day survival; it's all a contest of wits between hunters and hunted. Yet amidst the staged terror and excitement, the question still lingers: Why us, universe? What have we done? Rewatching the earlier films only deepens my amazement at the relentless alien occupation.

2024 brought us a prequel with the title A quiet place: day onethis time directed by Michael Sarnoski, who finally offers a hint of an explanation by moving the action from the countryside to the city. We're introduced to a new group of heroic victims, watching the sky fill with streaming launchers raining down on a buzzing Manhattan (and, we later learn, the rest of the world) on the first day of the invasion. Yet the film opens with a drone shot of Gotham, its soundtrack blaring with jackhammers and truck horns, while overlay text informs us that “New York City averages 90 decibels. The volume of a constant scream.” And yet the city's residents are blissfully hardened to the city's noise—an unwary sonic magnet that attracts galaxy-spanning devourers who love flesh and silence alike.

These angels of death explode on impact and crawl out of their craters like spiders, either in swarms or as individual hunters. For the next 99 minutes, we follow the childless cat Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), a terminally ill cancer patient, and her tomcat Frodo, who are soon joined by the British law student (Joseph Quinn). They constantly panic, huddle together, run for their lives, deceive the alien power in the midst of the Hollywood fever dream that results in spectacular destruction – smoldering buildings, burning gas pipes, flooded subways, rats. in paradise— is ultra cool.

Under such pressure, the most cunning among us stand a chance, for when their team spirit is tested, they shed their egoism, especially their useless self-pity. It's easy to cheer for the woman-man-cat trio, and fans who have seen the other two films will by now know the invaders' strengths and weaknesses. They're blind. They can't swim. They stomp about on wooden legs and are easily swayed or misled by a distracting noise. But their earlobes, shown in vibrant anatomical close-ups, are a dozen times larger and sharper than ours, so when a lamp falls or a human whimpers, they dart out of the shadows and rip apart their prey. And when an angry praying mantis knows its victim is trapped, it announces the murder by opening its mouth, revealing its stiletto teeth and a drooling grin before consuming another snail at the human market.

Much of the film's drama revolves around exploiting the monsters' most important weakness – their hypersensitive hearing causes them to find high-frequency sounds deafeningly painful. When emitted, this sound causes them to scream in pain and short-circuit their brains. (In the first film, the deaf daughter discovers this weakness and cleverly exploits it.) The shrieks incapacitate the creatures long enough for their intended victim to escape or fire a gunshot. In short, if you want to kill a “listening killer,” you must blast its eardrums, although this sound, like a stun grenade, also punishes human eardrums.

In A quiet place: day oneWhen the insects hear a dropped glass or the cry of a baby, they attack the source. But when the noise is insanely loud—helicopters and fighter jets, car alarms, vehicle sirens, ringing telephones—the insects swarm over the noise. Inconveniently, their swarming through the city only makes the noise worse. You might think they couldn't stand it. But they are parthenogenetically programmed. According to Day oneDirector Sarnoski: “The creatures are somehow [like] Leaf-cutter ants … use people's organic material to grow their food source, which is these weird melon, egg, and mushroom things that they kind of feed the little ones.” So they're not sociopathic murderers, they're organic farmers.

It would perhaps be unwise to decipher Krasinski and co.'s extra-filmic messages about annihilation after watching this disturbing trilogy. That's clearly not what it's about. It's about showing how the brave and resourceful among us can stand up to this strange and murderous threat. And reassuringly, any of us could be brave and resourceful — cleverness is an innate trait. But the monsters don't feed on humans because we're smart; the films show that we're not. They crush our mass extinction because they're tonally bonkers.

In the first film, a newspaper headline on Krasinski's basement wall in a tool shop where he is experimenting with making a listening device for his daughter reads: “They can hear you.” One interpretation of this belated warning is that the creatures left their home because their eardrums, which, like the East German Stasi, catch every bit of the universe's chatter, could no longer take it. Our data farms, our cryptocurrency mining, our broadcast frequencies, our beaming satellites, our interplanetary curiosity, Donald Trump's voice and Kamala Harris' laughter – all of these have shattered their pre-Fall peace. These arthropods had to Keep your mouth shut because we would not We close ourselves off, not even a little bit. The mania of the praying mantis' anger implies a revolt of the offended.

Nor is their assumption that we, in our carefree ignorance, are the perfect targets. People who are insensitive to noise are easier to eradicate because when they are irritated in masses we lose control and fall helplessly to the colonizer. We moan, scream, panic and run until we are cornered and beheaded. The creatures need no finesse; they sense that we cannot remain silent forever. This is the nature of our stupidity; although we know countless paths to extinction, we are collectively unable to change.

In fact, the Quiet place The trilogy strongly implies that our annihilation is by invitation. Our restless habitat attracts voracious creatures that cannot stand two kinds of noise: 1) our decibel din of military readiness, airplanes, traffic, emergencies, and mass gatherings, and 2) our quivering fear, a kind of inner shriek about living in a world where personal dissatisfaction and apathy turn up the volume.

I remember Nietzsche, who said: Everything that threatens to destroy us, Is us, tainted with our stamp – pollutants, carbonization, melting polar caps, resource depletion. That we are our own executioners is hardly news, but these films raise the stakes by making retreat into imprisoning silence the price of survival. Nietzsche's insight suggests that we live in an age where we listen only to ourselves, our tribes, our devices. And so a dominant species shows up on our doorstep with a license to destroy. Something about the amount of noise we generate, and the resulting inability to ignore it, is going to bother us.

In A quiet place: Day onethe penalty for the meganoise of modernity is a showdown between the world we knew before the population explosion and today's skull-shattering and soul-destroying noisescapes, where 57 percent of people are crammed into urban dependency. What we have done to attract the monomaniacal savagery of the invaders is to abandon our mammalian self-protective structure. Their invasion lets them be the saviors of the planet, and it is we who have become an offshoot, creating a society in acoustic turmoil in the midst of our paradisiacal heritage. Thus those who come to earth and those pacified refugees who outwit the onslaught at untold cost belong to an order – barred, threatened by the species, and chomping at the bit from Darwin's menu.