I think of talented violinists like Belinda Broughton and Julie Gigante, who are lovely in real life, but who here as part of Beltrami’s orchestra are straining to make their strings twist out these agonizing, blood-curdling chords. Almost every cue in the score features a passage of music that sounds like the musicians are doing something unnatural, abusing their instruments in abominable ways. I’m sure there are a great number of complicated things going on – extended techniques in the strings, unusual ways of phrasing the brass, layers of carefully crafted electronic sound design, intricate and dense percussion patterns – but when I hear music like this, separated from its picture, my brain goes into survival mode and reacts with little more than basic onomatopoeias, giving me words like screech and scream, crash and smash and thump, drone and whine. Truthfully, I don’t think I have the technical vocabulary to describe exactly what Beltrami is doing here. As good as the music is in context – and, again, let me reiterate, it is very good – the soundtrack listening experience verges on aural torture. ![]() But, unfortunately, the music also exists as a separate product which can be purchased and experienced apart from the film, and that’s where the problems start. If I wanted to be kind, that could and should be the end of the review. Then, when one or other of them comes face-to-face with one of these ghastly beasts, Beltrami is there, making his orchestra scream bloody murder as the creature crawls up your stairs to where you are hiding, or accompanying your desperate sprint for your life with rampaging string ostinatos. Beltrami’s eerie, insistent, sometimes overwhelmingly dissonant music ratchets up the tension a thousand fold whether it’s a simple scene of the family walking along the disused railroad tracks through the woods, or reacting to faraway bumps in the night, the music allows the viewer to live inside the skin of the characters, feel their constant wariness, hear the thump of a heartbeat in their chest, or see them freeze in their tracks, trying not to make a murmur. Sound, or the absence of it, plays a major role in defining the tone of the film there is virtually no spoken dialogue in the entire movie (the characters communicate through sign language), which means that all the film’s emotional drivers come from the sound effects and its score, which was written by Marco Beltrami in conjunction with ‘additional music’ composers Buck Sanders, Miles Hankins, Brandon Roberts, and Marcus Trumpp.īefore I go any further, I have to make a very clear distinction here between the music as heard in the film, and the music as heard as a standalone album because, in the film, the music works like gangbusters. The film is a tremendous exercise in tension and anxiety, with excellent performances by each of the four leads – the two adults, and the two oldest children, who are played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, and Noah Jupe from Subirbicon. The film follows their efforts to survive – scavenging for food, maintaining their farmhouse home, and raising the children, trying to build a life in this nightmarish scenario – while all the while trying to remain utterly silent so as not to attract the monsters who roam the woods around their property. Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt play Lee and Evelyn, a husband and wife with three children – one of whom is deaf and wears a cochlear implant – and a baby on the way. The monsters are blind but have intensely acute hearing, and attack and slaughter any living thing that makes a noise. This film is a very different kettle of fish it is set an indeterminate period in the future in the aftermath of an invasion by some sort of race of monsters – possibly aliens, possibly something else, it’s never quite explained. ![]() A Quiet Place is an effective, exciting, and scary horror-thriller, directed by John Krasinski, hitherto best known as the easy-going Jim from the American version of the sitcom The Office.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |