'Arcadian': A Not-So-Quiet Place

Nicolas Cage stars in this 'A Quiet Place'-esque monster movie.

The past few decades have been painfully lacking in cool movie monster designs. I don’t know if it’s because of the rise of CGI or just the homogenization of the film industry in general, but it feels like everyone ran out of fresh ideas for creepy critters a long time ago. Everything now just feels like some variation of something we’ve seen a million times before. I know that not every creature feature can have something as iconic as the xenomorph, but it’s almost like no one is even trying anymore.

Well - no one save for the makers of Arcadian, at least. The monsters in this movie are AWESOME: ghoulish and scary and not quite like anything I can remember ever having seen before. I don’t even know how to describe them, which is probably for the best; they do a lot of stuff that is genuinely surprising, and the less you know about them going into the movie, the better (in fact, I’ll warn you not to Google them - the images online are all inaccurate, and the actual monsters are wwwwwaaayyyy cooler than what comes up). Suffice it to say, if there was nothing else good about Arcadian, the creature design would be A+++++ WDBWA.

Fortunately, there ARE other good things about Arcadian, which is a modest, fairly solid little post-apocalyptic thriller.

Directed by Benjamin Brewer from a screenplay by Mike Nilon, Arcadian has more than a bit in common with A Quiet Place: like that film, it’s about a family living in relative rural isolation (thus the title) after the world becomes overrun by monsters. The monsters in Arcadian aren’t sound sensitive like the ones in A Quiet Place, though, which means that while Arcadian doesn’t have as much of a “hook,” it also doesn’t have to constantly cheat just to make the story function (I mean, anyone evading monsters who hunt sound while carrying a newborn baby would be dead meat, 110%, right?).

In the case of Arcadian, the family consists of a father, Paul (Nicolas Cage), and his sons, Joseph (Jaeden Martell from It and Knives Out) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins, who played Will Robinson on the Netflix Lost in Space reboot). The creatures they need to evade are, like vampires, nocturnal, so the trio is relatively free to move about during the day… but at night, the baddies come out and scratch at the door and bang on the walls and try to find a way in.

The boys, both being teenagers, naturally have frequent petty squabbles, especially because they’re so vastly different: Joseph, the brilliant one, builds new devices to help the family survive, is intent on capturing and studying one of the monsters, and seems to be Paul’s favored son, while Thomas is both more physical and rebellious. When Joseph is inside playing Mr. Wizard, Thomas is at another family’s nearby farm, fostering puppy love with their daughter, Charlotte (Sadie Soverall, who had a small part in last year’s Saltburn as one one of Jacob Elordi’s discarded romantic conquests). And you probably don’t need me to tell you that the brothers are eventually going to have to put their differences aside and work together if they want to survive.

Somewhat oddly, given that he’s played by Nic Cage, Paul is Arcadian’s greatest weakness. It’s not because Cage is playing a quieter character with an inherent decency; as much as we all love wild man Nic Cage, he is capable of more subdued performances that are also excellent (I cannot recommend 2021’s Pig highly enough). Nor is it because the actual details of Paul’s backstory are so vague (we learn virtually nothing about his life prior to the creatures showing up). It’s because he’s a goddamn saint who barely gets to have any non-physical conflict.

In A Quiet Place, there’s tension between the John Krasinski character and his daughter, because she believes he blames her for the death of her younger brother; they both have a lot of guilt, regret, and sorrow, the growing distance between them is readily apparent, and the whole story turns out to be about Krasinski proving to her just how much he loves her. They kind of set up a similar dispute between Paul and Thomas, but it never comes to much. Paul lacks the pathos to be a truly interesting character, which robs Arcadian of some of its potential dramatic heft (the surprisingly gentle, almost George Winston-esque score, by Kristin Gundred and Josh Martin, helps to pick up the slack).

But even if Arcadian isn’t quite as good as it could have been, it’s still pretty darn good: the characters feel real, the performances are solid, and Brewer demonstrates a masterful understanding of how to wring tension from dramatic irony: there are at least two scenes in this movie that I guarantee will make you scream at your monitor for the characters to turn around. And did I mention the excellent creature design? Because I cannot stop thinking about the monsters in this film. When’s the last time you were able to say that?