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. Continue reading “A Quiet Place”