Episode 25: A Quiet Place and Signs

Science Fiction thrillers. Sarah Watt, Jeremy Downing and William Chen discuss A Quiet Place and Signs, two films with a lot of similarities, with the most obvious connections being that they are about small families surviving in the midst of an invasion by hostile creatures. We start by discussing the merits of A Quiet Place and the dated qualities of Signs. We discuss the history of cinema around the release of Signs and where M. Night Shyamalan's career headed. Discussion then moves into the merits of A Quiet Place, particularly the strength of the acting without spoken dialogue. Our discussion then goes back to M. Night Shyamalan's films and the atrociousness of The Happening, Split and Lady In The Water. For fear of bagging on Signs the whole time, we then move our discussion back to A Quiet Place and talk about its strong world-building, its ability to build a threatening alien presence, and the metaphor of the silence present in the film. We talk about the strength of the sound design in the film, including the use of diegetic music, comparing it to a similar use in Lost and Baby Driver. But we can't help ourselves and return to pull apart Signs.