Tag Archives: The Quiet Ones
The Crew Is Good
The Quiet Ones
by Matt Weiner
Chicago. Miami. Los Angeles… Copenhagen?
The city might not spring to mind as a cinematic crime capital. But The Quiet Ones from director Frederik Louis Hviid is here to rectify that with a taut retelling of the largest heist in Danish history.
In both direction and tone, with a suitably lean script by Anders Frithiof August, The Quiet Ones brings the spirit of Michael Mann to Scandinavia. Kasper (Gustav Giese) is a boxer who is too much of a loser to even be a contender. (He can’t even rise to “coulda been the guy the contenders knock out on the way to better matches.”)
He yearns to be something more, and Giese lends the stoic Kasper enough ambiguity that it’s never fully clear if he wants to succeed more for his family or himself. Although part of that also stems from the script having little time for motivation or character development that extends beyond criminal shorthand and quick tropes.
Kasper has ties to the criminal underworld through his brother-in-law, and gets tapped by a ruthless killer (Reda Kateb) to help plan the daring robbery of a cash-handling business that holds tens of millions of international currency in a nondescript warehouse.
There is little that exists in the world of The Quiet Ones outside of the planning and execution of the heist, but then that’s not the movie it wants to be. Instead, Hviid delivers a series of gripping, highly effective action sequences. Long takes and inspired framing never shy away from brutality, especially the heart-pounding opening that sets the tone for what to expect from the robbers.
The film excels at what it’s there to deliver, but has much less in the way of compelling connective tissue for anything else. And that’s even more so for the cops side of the cops and robbers equation.
Maria (Amanda Collin, the only person called on to flash even more pained silent grimaces than Kasper) is a security guard at the warehouse that gets robbed. As an aspiring police officer, her singular focus puts her on a collision course with the thieves. But there’s just not enough time with most characters, and the inevitable confrontation comes across as overdetermined rather than climactic.
There’s also the financial crisis of 2007-2008 that hovers over the heist through news reports and imbues the film with some occasional social commentary that the script itself doesn’t have time to get to. But this is ultimately a heist movie. The Quiet Ones and its crew are there to do one job, and they do it well.
Mad Science..Rarely Beneficial
The Quiet Ones
by Hope Madden
Like many other genre fans, I was cautiously and nostalgically optimistic when a Dutch company bought the Brit horror producer Hammer Films with the promise of reviving the brand. Soon came the excellent, stylish remake Let Me In and the surprisingly spooky The Woman in Black. My optimism grew.
The Quiet Ones lets Hammer return to its expansive British dwellings for a period piece where mad science meets Sumerian curses.
OK, well that does sound like a flop, but wait. One of the writers, Oren Moverman, penned the exceptional indie dramas I’m Not There, The Messenger and Rampart. Surely he can take that premise and whip it into shape. I mean, unless he was actually brought in to salvage a muddled mess second draft adaptation of an old, unfilmed screenplay.
Wait, he was?
Well, that second draft surely benefited from the skilled hand of a genre expert, yes?
The guy who penned the abysmal American remake The Uninvited?
Well, poop.
It’s 1974, and an Oxford professor (Jared Harris) recruits two of his brightest students plus a willing, if nervous, cameraman to work with him on an unorthodox experiment. He intends to pull the negative energy out of Jane (Olivia Cooke – sort of a young Christina Ricci minus the sex appeal). Once he’s pulled it out, he wants to put it into an object – say, a creepy doll – and then throw it away, convinced that this will cure all mental illness everywhere. But Jane’s negative energy has a spirit of its own, and mad science rarely benefits its patients, anyway.
So, yes, The Quiet Ones suffers from a confused screenplay, but also from the uninspired direction of John Pogue (Ghost Ship – ugh).
Pogue misinterprets the old adage that in horror, less is more. This saying holds true only if you’re artfully leaving certain things to the ripe imagination of the viewer. If, instead, you’re wheeling your camera around in a frenzy to avoid having to show what’s going on, or your characters are conveniently pulled into closets just as the horror happens, you may just be a lazy filmmaker.
Not that The Quiet Ones is all bad. All performances are solid, with Harris bringing real zeal to his role. There are a couple of fun scares, too. For a casual consumer of horror, it’s better than about 50% of the material that hits screens, and offers a fun if forgettable way to spend 90 minutes.
But Hammer can do better.
