The Deeper You Dig

How much exposition do you require in order to enjoy a scary movie? Do you need to know why a ghost is angry before you can truly invest in a story, or is the promise of a horde of raging smash-beasts raging through Manhattan all you need to take the ride?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, now that Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma and Michael Sarnoski’s A Quiet Place: Day One have arrived on disc. They’re very different films, on almost every level: Exhuma is a slow-boil creeper about a quartet of Korean ghostbusters who cleanse a haunting only to find they’ve unleashed something far worse than the spirit of an unquiet ancestor, while Day One is the third chapter in its franchise, a massive production that rolls the story back to the day those nasty sound-hating aliens started wiping out the human race. What they have in common is a certain level of opacity, rendering their familiar stories refreshingly unpredictable.

Exhuma’s paranormal experts have a deep knowledge of rituals, spells and other defenses against the occult, but they’re all so well-versed in their respective crafts that they don’t really need to discuss what they’re doing to one another – and they don’t have time to explain themselves to civilians.

We see them at work, trying to break a family curse before it can latch onto the newest member of the Park family – and Jae’s script efficiently shows us that Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) is a master shaman despite her relative youth, able to summon ancient magic to counter whatever evil forces are afoot alongside her apprentice Bong-gil (Sweet Home’s Lee Do-hyun), who’d walk through fire for her. And we see that the serious-minded Mr. Kim (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik) is a skilled geomancer, able to read the earth for signs of supernatural disturbances, and the undertaker Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), who consults him in matters of burial and body recovery, trusts him implicitly.

When Kim and Yeong-geun run into something they can’t handle, they call Hwa-rim and Bong-gil – and their shared vocation has turned them into an unlikely family of sorts, gently bickering at the dinner table over this spell or that strategy.

The first act of Exhuma establishes everyone as really good at their respective jobs … so when things start going badly in the second act, with an ancient menace awakened after centuries of slumber and making things very personal for these guys, we have a rooting interest in them figuring out the nature of the problem and surviving long enough for Mr. Kim to make it to his daughter’s wedding.

Things go badly within the first ten minutes of A Quiet Place: Day One, with the aliens arriving to demolish everything and everyone around them – and trapping Lupita Nyong’o’s terrified Sam in a Lower Manhattan theater with a hundred or so of her fellow survivors, including her hospice nurse (Alex Wolff) and a guy named Henri (Djimon Hounsou), whom Quiet Place fans may recognize from his brief appearance in Part II.

In Part II, Henri was a weary survivor who’d spent months avoiding the alien menace. Here, he’s just a nice man who came to see a puppet show with his wife and son, and had no idea it would be the last normal thing his family ever did. He’s there to help Sam once the monsters come, and the two of them quickly figure out the rules we already know: The aliens will violently attack anything that makes even the slightest whisper, but they can’t otherwise detect humans, so it’s possible to survive if one is very, very clever.

Sam is as sharp as they come, but there’s something else about her that changes the way Day One functions: She’s dying, and she’s close enough to the end that she doesn’t really want to escape the city. The only thing she wants is to have one last slice of New York pizza – preferably from Patsy’s, in East Harlem – so that’s what she sets out to do, even as everyone else heads to the safety of the South Street Seaport, where boats are waiting to evacuate the island. (The monsters can’t swim, either, which is another thing we learned in Part II.)

Sam’s choice gives Day One a welcome unpredictability: If this franchise is all about survival, what happens when survival is irrelevant? The question is immediately complicated when she and her service cat Frodo rescue Eric (Joseph Quinn), a terrified young Englishman, in midtown, opening up a whole new avenue of drama as Eric and Sam bond while evading monster attacks … and trying to keep each other alive.

Sarnoski wowed me with his first feature, the genre-bending Nicolas Cage drama Pig, and I was skeptical that his delicate, mournful sensibility – as well as his knack for finding something new in actors we think we know inside and out – could translate to a big effects picture, which Day One very much is. But he nails it, using the enforced silence to make us look even more closely at Nyong’o and Quinn, to see if we can figure out what they’re thinking and feeling.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Sam’s orange watch cap, mustard-colored coat and pale blue sweater make her look, in certain shots, like a Tibetan monk, associating her with a type of acceptance and surrender that’s rarely seen in survival thrillers. This movie’s up to something, and letting us figure it out very, very slowly. It’s thoughtful in a way that John Krasinski’s movies weren’t, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Paramount’s 4K edition of Day One features downright threatening Dolby Atmos audio, expertly modulated to make us aware of every rustle and click in Sam’s environment; the image is equally strong, with crystal-clear detail and texture. The aliens look a little more grotty this time around, though that might just be due to refinements in CGI – or the fact that Day One has more daylight scenes than its predecessors.

Extras include five featurettes, all running between seven and eight minutes – a pretty straight making-of, and four others looking at the stops on Sam’s journey from Chinatown to Harlem – and four deleted and extended scenes. It’s a decent enough package, though I wish someone badgered Sarnoski and Nyong’o to record a commentary track; that would have been something.

Well Go’s Blu-ray edition of Exhuma looks and sounds great as well, with special attention paid to the way cinematographer Lee Mo-gae employs red and orange. A regular collaborator of Kim Jee-woon’s, having started out with Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters, the guy knows his way around creepy darkness – and knows when to break it. The only extras are the theatrical trailer and a four-minute EPK featurette, which are also included on the 4K release.

Exhuma is now available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Well Go Entertainment; A Quiet Place: Part Two is available separate 4K and Blu-ray editions – as well as a combo steelbook – from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Up next: Wes Craven and George A. Romero get UHD upgrades with Warner’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shout’s Land of the Dead, respectively. Hey, it’s Halloween all month over here.