Saturday, October 6, 2018

Blogtober day 6: Shhhh!



Put on my big witch panties and watched an actually scary movie. And I was definitely scared during it, and thankfully watching at home so I could pause at one moment and steel myself. I was hoping John Krasinski's being in it would take some of the edge off, having seen all of The Office a few times through, I'm familiar with Dad Jim and what could go horribly wrong besides some slight bungling of the plans when Dad Jim is around? Unfortunately this was Bitter Conflicted Semi Backwards Thinking Jim but he was still a great character. Sharing headphones for a music moment was pretty Jim, though.

Well, some horrible shit went down. It's a horror movie, after all. One everyone has been raving this year, and I do see the rich characters, the casting, and the details that have everyone going nuts over it. But there were also parts that made it so hard to get into and afterwards have left me not seeing it as the masterpiece everyone else seems to have. 


One of the most frustrating things is, while I can read viewer critiques and interviews of the cast & creators, I don't know them and can't gauge what's intended here and what they meant to show by it.
I'm already leery of the conservative message that pregnancy is a must no matter what and a scenario in which people keep having screaming babies through a process that involves screaming when there are murderous creatures that hunt by sound.

Also, they had the time to create a basement with full CCTV coverage around their farmhouse but they soundproofed the baby room with one mattress?  The monster is one foot away when you're holding the whimpering baby to you and you don't cover its mouth? Bare minimum check if the baby's nostrils are clear and then literally no risk and the benefit of not getting killed when the baby starts crying?

What makes it all the more frustrating, I feel, is that the attention to detail with other things is amazing. All their walking paths are lined with sand to muffle sounds of walking. When they're at the store, the items left are the shelves are ones in crinkly packaging that would be too risky to pick up. And all the signing, my god. Only one of the cast members is deaf and I would imagine the rest of the cast didn't have reason to know sign language before, but they did a really great job of not only making the signs but emulating the shift in behaviors and almost different culture of speaking by sign.

It's very literal but, to hearing people, doesn't seem simple until you make the shift to thinking as someone would who can hear either nothing or very little. "Listen to me" is a motion that frames the face, saying "I need your focus here, don't turn your head or be distracted, my words will be in this space right here so please look". There are smaller things that if it weren't a horror movie and just one about a silent or maybe entirely deaf family they could have implemented, such as methods of getting attention and putting things on the floor that roll or rumble around with movement and send vibrations through the floor. Little non-hearing lifestyle things. 


While I was excited about this movie and definitely had a horror movie experience watching it, there are things about it that frustrated me too much to be able to enjoy it as much as other people seem to be. There was one part, however, that after the movie left me going "Oh my gooooooood!"
When the father is giving the newest model of homemade hearing aids to his daughter and she refuses, saying it never works, he says that it may not, but they keep trying. At the moment they mean the hearing aids, but at the end of the movie it fits for what they've been doing in life, trying to survive against the monsters and find a weakness.



Did you like the movie? What did you think of the things I mentioned?








1 comment:

Sassy Southrn Ma said...

I’ve never watched this movie, either, but it sounds like you’ve done a great review of it!