Noisy people are the absolute worst
dir: Michael Sarnoski
2024
Michael Sarnoski made probably the best film that I saw in 2021, even more inexplicably it starred Nicolas Cage. That film was called Pig, and even a staunch supporter of that film would still be both glad, on his behalf, and perplexed that he would have such a gig as directing this here third instalment in a science fiction post-apocalyptic franchise.
I’m not going to pretend I haven’t watched the other ones: I have. I thought the first one was fantastic; I thought the second one was pretty okay, and when I heard they were making a third one I yawned, mightily. My jaw probably made a cracking sound.
But then I heard Lupita Nyong’o would star, and that this guy would direct, and thought “that could be something remarkable”.
Well. It’s a fine film. It’s unnecessary, and doesn’t advance anything, not that we needed to go anywhere, with the relentless illusion of constant progress, but it’s better than I thought it would be. It’s odd enough in its intentions that it works okay for what it is.
The great Djimon Hounsou had a role in the second one, as the primary family tries to get to a place where the scary aliens who hate noise can’t eat them; he’s on some island. In this flick he gets far more screen time, but to far less purpose. This flick, if it has a purpose, explains how Djimon Hounsou’s character got to that island.
But, in the immortal words my kid uses to signify a supreme lack of interest in a topic: “thanks but I don’t remember asking, bro.”
The first two flicks mostly transpire in the “present”, which is a world in which civilisation has fallen apart because blind aliens invaded and ate everyone. Not just like the shitty people who are too noisy and chew with their mouths open, but like useful, decent people as well.
This flick occurs in the past, which, I guess, is our present, on the day in which the aliens come to Earth and start eating everyone. Our protagonist, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) has stage 4 cancer, and she’s living in a hospice, not knowing if she has minutes or months to live.
Understandably, she is jack of it all, and the only thing that sustains her is large medical doses of fentanyl through patches. She has a cat called Frodo, who plays a ridiculously large role throughout the film, and seems to either be the right paw of God or an agent of diabolical chaos.
On a day when the hospice residents are taken to see a marionette play at some theatre in New York, calamity rains down from the sky. Sam’s purpose, with all this death and destruction around, is not really to save herself long term. She is as terrified as everyone else being picked off by these ruthless and relentless creatures. She learns swiftly, like only survivors do, that noise equals death, not only for the person making noise but probably for the people around them. Djimon Hounsou’s character demonstrates this graphically in a scene where one person screaming “we’re all going to die!” imperils not only the person saying it but Djimon Hounsou and his character’s son as well.
What’s a man to do in such a circumstance…insist repeatedly? Extol the virtues of a vow of silence, but with only hand signals?
Nup. Sometimes you’ve got to crack a few skulls to save a lot of skulls.
Sam mostly just wants to maintain her pain meds regimen, but she also has the completely unhelpful and irrational (if rationality matters at such a moment when human civilisation effectively ends on this one day) impulse, drive, if you will, to get some pizza from a particular place in Harlem. That’s all she wants to do, get to Harlem, have some pizza, then probably die.
Nothing that Sam does is rational, including persisting to look after the cat, because the cat, just like the baby-on-the-way in the first flick, is the greatest potential danger to our heroes, since babies and cats can’t be reasoned with, and can’t be made to keep quiet in a bold new world where noise gets you killed within seconds. But that’s okay. This is effectively a survival horror flick, so rationality doesn’t really matter. Jump scares abound. The unlucky and unfortunate die very quickly and very cheaply. Death lurks around every corner.
However. Sam picks up a stray, or at least her cat keeps forcing Sam into interactions with people and even compels her to take on a stray human. A Stray British guy at that. A completely ineffectual Englishman from Kent, at that, who doesn’t appear to have even basic survival skills or a modicum of self-preservation. But he’s a nice enough chap (Joseph Quinn, so memorable as Eddie in that last season of Stranger Things). Even as she implores him to fuck off, he doesn’t really have anywhere to go, and barely knows what to do in any given situation.
Eric doesn’t really even need a name, but he has one. It’s the cat, you see. We know that Sam doesn’t make it to the later films, or at least we suspect it’s very unlikely she survived the downfall of humanity very long. But she needs someone to look after the cat.
The cat brought them together; but the cat probably somehow did it for its own purposes?
We all know that cats and dogs, as domesticated creatures, can’t really survive without us. More recently I’ve been reading essays that argue that cats and dogs, and even grains like wheat and such, domesticated us, and not the other way around. They did it for their purposes; not ours.
So maybe the cat keeps causing all this trouble and getting the humans into dire situations because it either it’s trying to figure out the best way for it to survive, or, more likely, has no plan, and is just causing trouble because it worships chaos, like all cats do.
It was hard to not see some elements of mawkish “god works in mysterious ways” bullshit in some of the stuff that happens, which, to someone like me, doesn’t bring positive feels, in fact it’s offputting. On that one day when millions of others aren’t spared, the Judeo-Christian god puts in the time and effort to direct this one cat to save this one (white) British guy in order to save the cat: That’s implausible even within a belief system about an invisible sky god who’s obsessed with what people do with their genitals, and his carpenter son who died 2000 years ago.
And yet Sam’s ‘journey’ as it’s posited, is the reverse of that. Since she has no path forward, it’s about her getting to honour her father before she passes, dance a little to Nina Simone, and then welcome Death with open arms when she’s good and ready. And I’m not in a position to gainsay any of that. Lupita Nyong’o is magnificent in this like she is in everything she does. This isn’t my absolute favourite thing she’s done, since she was stunning in Us, and I prize her more in the Black Panther films. My favourite role of hers (though it wasn’t a better film) was as an exasperated kindergarten teacher in Little Monsters, which was about a different kind of apocalypse. In Australia no less.
But that’s by the by. She does well in a flick that doesn’t really need to exist, but, let’s be honest, practically none of them need to exist. They do what they do for their own reasons, and then we forget about them and go on with the rest of our lives, paying bills and paying off fines and bookies and dealers because, that’s life, and some things you just can’t avoid, no matter how quiet you are.
7 times and there are plenty of eerie September 11 references, as if Americans have given us any time to forget out of 10
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“What do we do?”
- “Save everyone we can.” – just do it quietly - A Quiet Place: Day One
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