This week saw A24 announce that Michael Sarnoski, director of A Quiet Place: Day One, would be helming its upcoming film adaptation of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Though I have semi-mixed feelings about A24 branching out into IP filmmaking, Death Stranding has always been a good fit for the studio’s identity. And Sarnoski is an equally good fit as director.
Looking For Death Stranding In Pig
Both of Sarnoski’s feature films have been stories about quiet but determined protagonists setting out in search of an objective that might seem silly at first. In Sarnoski’s debut feature, Pig, it was Nicolas Cage’s Robin Feld, a former chef who now lives in the woods outside Portland, hunting for truffles with his pig. When that pig is kidnapped, Rob sets out to find the men who took her and bring her home.
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As many noted at the time, that premise sounds like it’s setting up a John Wick-style revenge movie, but Pig isn’t that. It’s quieter and sadder and more interested in the reality of grief than the bloody payback it often inspires in movies.
Pizza At The End Of The World
When Sarnoski got a bigger budget, the result was similarly subdued. In A Quiet Place: Day One, Lupita Nyong’o plays a terminally ill woman living at a hospice center near New York City. She’s in the city with other patients when the alien invasion begins. Knowing that the world is ending, she sets out to get one last slice of pizza at a favorite spot that she shared with her father.
As with Pig, Sarnoski chooses a protagonist living a sad, recessive life and makes them the hero of a movie that would seem to demand a go-getter. You would expect someone with a strong will to survive to be at the heart of a film like this, not someone who has already come to terms with their inevitable death. He built the movie around a small, seemingly unimportant goal — the kind that would be a side quest in a video game. Can you imagine building a game around something as simple as getting a pizza slice?
Silent, Small Moments
That smallness makes Sarnoski the perfect choice to adapt Death Stranding, a game about accomplishing small tasks in service of an overarching goal. That overarching goal is reconnecting an isolated United States, where most people live alone in underground bunkers. But on a mission-by-mission level, it’s a game about making and taking deliveries. That’s a good fit for the toolset Sarnoski has developed across his first two films.
The quietness of Sarnoski’s films also makes him a good fit for Death Stranding, a game where much of your time is spent silently hiking through isolated locales. Death Stranding is set in an apocalyptic version of the United States that looks nothing like most of the United States. It looks much closer to Iceland, but if I had to pick an area in the U.S. that comes closest to Death Stranding’s green and gray version, it would be the Pacific Northwest, where Pig is set. So, from a purely visual standpoint, I see the vision.
It’s hard to know what an A24 video game movie will look like, especially one developed in collaboration with Hideo Kojima. But Sarnoski is the kind of offbeat filmmaker that has already proven he knows how to weave the spectacular and the small, and that fusion will suit Kojima’s iconoclastic open-world game well.
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