While the prequel Without a Sound: Day One offers a new angle to John Krasinski’s horrific saga, why not return to Starfish, another post-apocalyptic populated by creatures from elsewhere?
In 2018, the first Sans un Bruit, by and with John Krasinski, was a hit in theaters. Its ultra-effective concept of a world invaded by blind extraterrestrial monsters with overdeveloped hearing, condemning the surviving humans to live in silence, had the merit of offering a horror and action film with palpable tension .
But the following year, a much more confidential film, a pure festival product, explores a similar universe with Virginia Gardner in the lead role. This time, it is no longer a question of a family life to be preserved in adversity, but, on the contrary, of questioning the necessity of living through a study of solitude. This is the project of the gentle Starfish, poet and depressive cousin of A Quiet Place, directed by AT White, whose only film to date this is.
Winter is coming
Quietly but with Aubrey
The post-apocalyptic genre does not necessarily rhyme with natural disasters, wars of civilization or protecting a small family. If these three motifs come back very often in the genre, promising both great spectacle and emotion, others focus on the possibility of finding oneself much more alone than that facing the end of the world as we know it. This is obviously the case of the three adaptations of the novel I am Legend, whose hero is the last human on Earth not to have been transformed into a murderous creature.
In Starfish, it is also the prism of solitude which is chosen, with priority given to introspection, and in an intimate approach which refuses any grandiloquence of the apocalypse. When young Aubrey wakes up from a good big nap after returning from the funeral of her best friend Grace (because the good atmosphere is there from the start), she gradually understands that a widespread massacre has taken place. while she slept, and the people around her are almost all dead, killed by blind flesh monsters with sharp teeth.
Apocalypse or not, it’s fun on the couch
From then on, Aubrey’s contact with a semblance of humanity will only be through sound, since she travels the city in search of the audio cassettes hidden by Grace, and she communicates by walkie-talkie with another survivor. With undoubtedly more sound work than there is in the entire Sans un Bruit saga, the staging and atmosphere of Starfish isolate Aubrey in a gentle permanent floating, she who also remains alone after before the apocalypse.
The idea is not so much to see the end of the world through an individual case that allows identification, but much more to see it through the subjectivity of the character’s mind. Transforming the end of the world into a personal experience, in…
