Director John Krasinski does an excellent job in the opening moments of A Quiet Place establishing the unfortunate predicament of these doomed protagonists. It’s your typical end of the world scenario, the camera scours some deserted pharmacy, but no one is making a noise. The scavenging family speaks only through sign language, and when the mother picks up a bottle of pills from a shelf, she does so with the utmost care. But if that wasn’t enough, there’s a helpful New York Post with a headline that blares, “IT’S SOUND!”
The hard part for Krasinski is going beyond those opening minutes and making A Quiet Place something more than a horror movie without sound. And it doesn’t take long before even that trick starts to feel gimmicky. But even without much dialogue, A Quiet Place is a heartfelt and consistently tense movie about a family coping with the loss of a member and learning to appreciate one another.
In A Quiet Place, monsters that look like a cross between Alien’s Xenomorph and Stranger Things’ Demogorgon hunt down anything they can hear. And in the movie’s prologue, the youngest son of the family is eaten alive. Now a year later, they’ve cultivated a whole life without sound, stepping gingerly on worn parts of a creaky wood floor, playing board games with felt pieces and sound proofing a nursery for the arrival of their newborn.
It’s tense for sure, but you want more from a movie than just a gimmick that amplifies jump scares. Early on, the danger only creeps in whenever someone knocks over a lantern or drops a load of laundry. Krasinski isn’t using the absence of sound the way Hitchcock or even the Coen brothers might, letting us know cinematically where the monsters are at all times.
Eventually though, Krasinski stages some masterful, creative set pieces, and he uses sound as more than just a scare tactic and liability. For instance, Emily Blunt and Krasinski slow-dance to the sound of Neil Young emerging from Blunt’s earbuds. Then there’s the oldest child in the family, a deaf girl played by real-life deaf actress Millicent Simmonds. There’s not just fear but pathos in getting close to a character who can’t hear her family scream. And best of all is a scene set beneath a massive waterfall. Krasinski lets out a yell, and it’s a touching moment of family bonding between a father and son.
This is a convincing performance for Krasinski, who nails the bearded father with heavy eyes as though he were Joel Edgerton in It Comes at Night. He takes his material seriously, and he proves he’s an actor to be taken seriously as well. And Blunt is even better, exerting such effort in her face and her breathing to show us her internal agony and pain of child birth without uttering a peep.
A Quiet Place may be remembered more as a movie where people were afraid to crinkle their candy wrappers or munch on popcorn. But quietly, it’s a well made, subversively clever studio horror movie that deserves to make a lot of noise.
3 ½ stars