Scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) wakes up alone - and not just in his bed. Overnight, every human being has seemingly vanished.
Stumbling through this familiar yet uncanny landscape, Zac has to fend for himself - until he discovers he is not as alone as he initially thought.
While I would not call The Quiet Earth a straightforward horror movie, when writing about New Zealand genre cinema, it cannot be ignored. Besides, if the existential dread of being alone, at the mercy of a seemingly godless universe, does not count as horror, I do not know what does.
When I was growing up, and reading about New Zealand cinema, Geoff Murphy was one of the filmmakers who stood out.
Not for his movies, but because there was a collection of his written thoughts that gave me an insight into the New Zealand new wave of the 70s and 80s.I remember an article he wrote covering the making of Goodbye Pork Pie, in which he talked about the difficulties of making the movie on the cheap, and bizarre euphoria of its success.
As a director, I was a little unsure of him. It was not in doubt that he had a facility for action (his Hollywood career is anonymous but I think he does a great job bringing Under Siege 2 to some kind of life). But he also has a goofy sense of humor which I felt undermined Utu.
My feelings might be a partial result of the one time I saw Murphy in person. It was in 2013, at a Q&A for the director’s cut of Utu. It was a fun occasion, with Anzac Wallace and Ian Mune acting as emcee - but every time someone would raise a question, Murphy would turn it into a joke. Because he did not take himself seriously, that bled a bit into how I watched his films in the years since.
I wish I had watched The Quiet Earth sooner.
The first half of the film is remarkable - a slowly unraveling nightmare, as our hero goes from vaguely incredulous to completely unmoored at the abandoned world around him.
The shots of empty Auckland streets filled with empty vehicles retain an eerie power.
Anchored by Bruno Lawrence, his vibrant, by turns ribald and melancholy, performance is one of the greats of New Zealand cinema. Angry, terrified, and absurdist, he is absolutely hypnotising.
The character has the opportunity to do whatever he wants, and Lawrence plays these scenes (driving a train, playing saxophone while walking down Queen Street in the pouring rain) with a manic glee that feels like a release, or distraction from, his aching sense of loneliness.
With no one else to condemn or challenge him, Zac turns on the pillars of the fallen world - first, in a longwinded monologue he gives to an audience of cardboard cutouts of famous figures from recent history, he decries the choices that have led to this calamity.
And in the second, iconic scene, he stalks through a church with a shotgun, demanding God to show up and prove its existence, before unloading his weapon into a sculpture of Jesus.
The film does not get bogged down trying to explain Zac’s predicament - he works at a secret government facility, and it appears the project he was working on may have led to this predicament.
It could also be more existential - it is hypothesized that Zac survived because he had attempted to take his own life. This macabre revelation is shared with the other survivors he eventually meets, Joanne (Alison Routledge) and Api (Pete Smith), who were similarly at the point of death when the ‘Effect’ occurred.
I have read some literature that criticises the second half of The Quiet Earth, feeling that the film loses its sense of existential dread, and the unique energy of Lawrence’s one-man-show.
I take it as a puncturing of the Pakeha ‘man alone’ myth that underpinned so many of New Zealand’s stories about itself - you can see variations on this theme in Sleeping Dogs and The Lost Tribe.
No longer alone, Zac’s personal crisis is put aside for a new group dynamic fraught with a different set of tensions, over sex, gender and race.
While Joanne ends up as a partner to both men, there is an undercurrent of sexual menace to the trio’s early interactions, as both men vie for her attention.
Dressed in black leather and armed with weapons, Api looks like a racist’s nightmare of a young Maori man. Deliberately designed to echo the garb of a biker gang (or, considering the context, a post-apocalyptic raider), his costuming is a shrewd piece of misdirection.
When the trio finally meet, Murphy stages the scene like the final showdown from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with long shots of the three actors in a circle, intercut with close-ups between Lawrence and Smith.
Dropping his weapon, Api smiles cautiously.
“Kia ora”, he says, before they all embrace.
Api’s presence means this new world is not solely the preserve of Zac, a white man. In the end, the literal future is in Api and Joanne’s hands. Shortly before the finale of the film, Api and Joanne have sex, and the camera holds on Pete Smith’s face as he finishes.
The idea of a man sacrificing himself after generating progeny is a familiar one in storytelling (see Andor and No Time To Die for recent examples), and while this example is not exactly subtle, it gives the ending - celebrated for its ambiguity - a sense of hope that feels particularly resonant to its local context.
Zac has left his companions to build a future together - one hopefully free of the white, colonial hubris and violence (the project is explicitly a product of the Cold War) which led to the Effect.
While Lawrence gets a lot of the spotlight for the acting in The Quiet Earth, his co-stars are not to be dismissed.
As Api, Pete Smith gives the character a weariness and sense of pathos that belay his strong front. He is the most understated of the trio, but he says a lot with very little.
Routledge gets the short shrift as Joanne - the character gets the least interesting arc, and almost becomes a symbol of the relationship between the two men.
Overall, a fantastic film. One of the most unique genre efforts New Zealand cinema has produced, and worth a look.
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