Krishna
Strangely, this movie feels a bit like déjà vu. Why? Because this one is very similar to A Quiet Place, and also came out very nearly at the same time.
In that movie, sound is the dead giveaway and in this one, sight is the dead giveaway. There, as here, the story is about a family’s struggle to stay alive on the face of impossible odds after a catastrophe has devastated the nation. (Or the area where they live, at any rate)
The movie starts with a radio broadcast where they call everyone who has survived to take the boat to an island. They ask no children to be brought as the children would not be able to survive.
Now, we see the three people (mother, a boy and a girl) going on a boat. They all have blindfolds on. (Why? Read on.) The story goes forward and backwards, filled with dangers and events in both timelines.
The movie starts with a mother, Malorie Hayes, telling her two children that they are taking a dangerous trip across the water and warning them to do as she tells them. Malorie is played by Sandra Bullock who seems to choose her movies with commendable care these days.
We understand the background through a series of flashbacks. This seems to be the modern storytelling method that is the most popular, and in this movie too, it works very well!
We realize that she has named her kids just Boy and Girl, because, as we later understand, the likelihood of their surviving were so low that she does not want to have the additional emotional agony of losing them after christening them.
The tension escalates slowly. They show a pregnant Malorie, going with her sister Jessica, hearing about an epidemic where people turn crazy and turn on each other. After visiting the (Indian American) doctor – a cliché these days – they see that it has already spread to their city in America when they see that people (some of whom were normal on their way to the doctor) behaving erratically. Jesse dies in an accident and quickly quite a few are slaughtered in front of the eye of horrified Malorie.
They all take refuge in a house where there are a few people. The house is owned by one Douglas. He tries to keep the group to a minimum to avoid taking in people already ‘infected’ but is overruled.
Of the group they start leaving/ dying one by one. A couple flee when they hear their son seemingly in imminent danger. Once they compare notes, they realize that the affliction is through sight. They board up and paper over doors and windows to prevent even any sight of the outside from intruding in their house. Douglas has enough dried food in the house to last them for months.
They let in Olympia who is pregnant over the objections of Douglas after confiscating his rifle to prevent him from threatening to shoot him. They have an electronic monitor. Greg, a man, volunteers to watch it so that they will know if there is any threat. Since he will be watching only an electronic image, he should be immune from becoming crazy, should he not? Just as a precaution, they tie him up and when they later hear noises from the room, they go in to see that he did indeed go out of control but when they go in to see, they see that he was influenced and his mind went crazy and he tried to move, fell down, (conveniently) hit his head and died.
There is a cute scene where they have to go out since the food finally runs out (more people there than originally planned for) and they go out. Since they cannot see anything, they drive with the help of a proximity monitor (GPS cannot do it) that ‘directs them’ away from issues and major blockages on the road. They run over something that feels suspiciously like dead bodies but they reach the supermarket to which they were headed in one piece. But when they mistakenly try to let an old colleague in, they realize that he has been ‘converted’ and Charlie gives up his life to kill the intruder.
There is a great scene where Olympia lets a man Gary in, the same way they let her in originally. This man comes in and acts normal when suddenly you realize that he is one of the ‘infected’. He opens all windows and doors so that they can all see ‘the great things that have come to save us’. In front of your horrified eyes, so many start falling victim to the malaise. With the exception of Malorie, the two kids and Tom, a veteran of the armed forces, everyone else dies in trying to kill Gary by the time they succeed.
We learn that the girl is Olympia’s daughter. Finally Tom also gives up his life to save some of the infected from attacking the house and only the three are left.
There are a lot tense moments, which I will not go to. I will also not tell you why the ‘sanctuary’ that was announced in the radio is a safe haven. They are nice twists.
The movie is worth seeing. I understand that the book was also a best seller.
7/ 10
– – Krishna (September 2019)