Simon Morris looks at three smaller films: The Divine Order on why it took so long for Swiss women to get the vote, A Quiet Place, the story of a world where talking can be fatal, and Walking Out, which pits two men against the Rockie Mountains.
The Divine Order
The Divine Order follows Swiss women’s campaign for the vote and the hostility they meet in a small rural town.
If we think of Switzerland, we tend to think of how peaceful, prosperous and clinically modern it is. But it turns out that Switzerland was one of the last countries in the world to become fully democratised, granting women the right to vote in 1971.
The Divine Order, written and directed by Petra Biondina Volpe, is set in a small town in rural Switzerland.
Nora’s household is otherwise all male - husband Hans, two young sons and Hans’ chauvinist father who lives with them.
Nora hasn’t given the vote issue much thought, despite the growing clamour in the bigger cities. Until one day she decides she wants to get a part-time job.
Hans forbids it, and it seems in 1970s Switzerland he could. Men ruled the family by law as much as they had a century before.
There’s a village meeting to confirm everyone opposes votes for women. But Nora rocks the boat by saying she’s in favour. Interestingly the leading proponent of “no votes please, we’re Swiss women” is Hans’ female boss.
Nora sticks to her guns, and in the manner of this sort of film others start to join her one by one – the older woman, the Italian divorcee, the farmer’s wife and so on.
And it’s not just votes these women are interested in. They start to read up about the sexual revolution that the rest of Europe has been going on about for years.
As the title suggests, religion is the excuse often trotted out for opposing the vote for women.
Women taking any interest in politics would somehow damage the family, though no-one spells out how exactly.
Actually the real reason seems to be simple, militant conservatism.
The pig-headed obstruction of the women’s movement is mirrored by the treatment of Nora’s young, rebellious niece who ends up in jail for disobeying her parents.
I found this story even more disturbing than the political one.
In the end, reason prevails and Switzerland joins the rest of the world. Fans of poetic justice might have liked to see rather stronger punishment meted out to some of the more appalling male characters in this film.
A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place sees a family under threat from creatures with highly-developed hearing. If you make any sort of noise you die.
There’s been a rise recently in the old-fashioned monster movie. ‘Creature Features’ were big in the 1950s, led by Godzilla and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Today, the tireless Guillermo del Toro has been reviving the genre at the top end with the Pacific Rim films and his Oscar winning Shape of Water.
But down among the B-movies, something’s stirring too, films like the aptly-named A Quiet Place. It’s the work of TV actor turned film director John Krasinski and the basic idea is “don’t say a word”.
Like most good examples of the horror genre, A Quiet Place keeps the explanations to a bare minimum.
The film opens on an empty town. Mum, Dad and their children are discovered silently looking for medicine in a deserted chemist shop.
On the way home, the youngest child absent-mindedly switches on a toy rocket-ship, and everyone panics.
All that silence should have tipped us off. There are monsters out in the undergrowth, and they’re coming to get you.
We don’t need to know much more, though the family – led by John Krasinski and real-life wife Emily Blunt – have conveniently left a few old New York Posts around with headlines like “Ghastly Invasion” and “They Go By Sound”.
But A Quiet Place doesn’t waste valuable time getting into confusing detail about how many of these monsters there are, where they came from, or even what they want.
It’s enough to know they’re there, they’ve got unbelievably good hearing, but – the good news – they’re also blind.
The other good news is that the family already speaks sign language because daughter Regan is deaf. She’s played - very well - by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, who’s the second-best thing in the film.
The best thing in A Quiet Place is Emily Blunt, whose expressive eyes are perfect for a film with hardly any dialogue.
Here she plays the pregnant Mum. That’s right, how’s she going to have the baby in total silence? And who’s going to tell the baby to keep the racket down?
In other words, like all good B-movies, the writers and director John Krasinski have put some thought in to getting the most out of a simple idea.
And, like its predecessors, Alien and Jaws, A Quiet Place believes in showing you the creature in instalments, saving the full horror for the end.
The endless silences do start to wear you down after a while, but the film keeps its momentum up admirably – certainly so fast that you’re given no time to ask unnecessary questions.
Nitpickers might point out that it stretches plausibility to breaking point at times - but making sense isn’t really the point in a movie like this.
A Quiet Place is an efficient example of a very specific genre, and to its credit it plays quite fair within the bounds it sets itself.
If you like scary movies – particularly scary movies about creepy, half-seen creatures – this is one for you.
For the rest of us, it can’t be denied it’s very well done – particularly the camera-work of Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen. A Quiet Place is a perfect example of making a little go a very long way.
Walking Out
Walking Out is a grueling story of a father and son who get in trouble in the Montana Rockies.
There’s a certain type of movie that I tend to lose all patience with.
It’s the one where our heroes go off into the wilderness, but first make sure they leave their phone behind, they tell no-one where they’re going, and they carry the bare minimum of equipment because – well, what could possibly go wrong?
That’s exactly what happens at the start of Walking Out. The fact that real people do this all the time is no excuse.
David, 14, played by Josh Wiggins flies in for his annual get-together with his outdoorsman father (Matt Bomer).
It’s a rite of passage weekend, the time when David gets to shoot his first moose.
Having left behind David’s phone, the pair take off into the Montana winter wilderness, with Dad giving his son useful advice, while his son grizzles about the lack of creature comforts.
On this trip, Dad picks up a spoor of moose, and encourages David to get bloodthirsty enough to want to kill the animal and then think about eating it.
But there are other varmints out in the wilderness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film about America’s northern wasteland that didn’t feature at least one angry grizzly bear.
This isn’t a story about a bear mauling Leonardo di Caprio – that would be The Revenant – it’s a story about getting the hell out of the mountains where at least one of you has come off second best to the elements.
The film might only be an hour and a half long but I promise you it feels every second of it as we follow Dad and David clambering slowly down the mountains.
Walking Out – the plot’s all in the title – is directed by twin brothers Alex and Andrew Smith who hail, surprisingly, from Buckinghamshire.
The cast is equally unknown – to me at any rate – apart from Bill Pullman who plays crusty old Grampa in flashbacks.
The trouble with a film like this, I suspect, is that the people who are most likely to be favourably disposed towards it – rugged, outdoor adventurers, the sort of people who’d fight a grizzly bear armed only with a toothpick – are the ones least likely to see it.
They’d prefer to be out there doing it, rather than sitting in wimpy comfort in some movie-palace watching it on the big screen.
Meanwhile the rest of us will find little enough to keep us company during the long time spent Walking Out.
Yes, it’s a coming of age film – in fact it’s two coming of age films for the price of one, I suppose – but you don’t get much comfort along with your education.
When you whittle a film down to its essentials, sometimes you can chop too much out of it. Sometimes the most important essential is some entertainment value.
