The Quiet Family is a dark comedy in which a family opens a bed and breakfast and the guests keep dying. It's an amusing premise, and I kind of liked it at first, but ultimately I didn't think it worked.
To me, this premise would work best if the family seemed innocent but trapped by fate, but this family is actually kind of awful and it doesn't feel like they're so much forced into bad things as that they are taking the path of least resistance. The premise could also work if they were just all ridiculously terrible, but ultimately they're just not very good people. Nor are they very interesting people.
The movie relies on a continual build. Something bad happens, is dealt with, something else bad happens, is dealt with, and the bad things begin to build on and clash with each other into a crescendo of hilarity. It's like a series of jokes that build on the first. And this movie is like a comedian tries to build a whole routine on one joke that fell flat.
Director Jee-woon Kim went on to make better movies, like The Good, The Bad, and the Weird, and the screenplay was loosely remade as the vastly superior Japanese movie The Happiness of the Katakuris. But somehow this director with this script did not make magic.
To me, this premise would work best if the family seemed innocent but trapped by fate, but this family is actually kind of awful and it doesn't feel like they're so much forced into bad things as that they are taking the path of least resistance. The premise could also work if they were just all ridiculously terrible, but ultimately they're just not very good people. Nor are they very interesting people.
The movie relies on a continual build. Something bad happens, is dealt with, something else bad happens, is dealt with, and the bad things begin to build on and clash with each other into a crescendo of hilarity. It's like a series of jokes that build on the first. And this movie is like a comedian tries to build a whole routine on one joke that fell flat.
Director Jee-woon Kim went on to make better movies, like The Good, The Bad, and the Weird, and the screenplay was loosely remade as the vastly superior Japanese movie The Happiness of the Katakuris. But somehow this director with this script did not make magic.