A Quiet Place review: silence never sounded so terrifying

A Quiet Place English Movie Details:

Directed by: John Krasinski

Produced by: Michael Bay

Andrew Form

Brad Fuller

Screenplay by: Bryan Woods

Scott Beck

John Krasinski

Story by: Bryan Woods

Scott Beck

Music by: Marco Beltrami

Cinematography: Charlotte Bruus Christensen

Edited by: Christopher Tellefsen

Production companies: Sunday Night

Platinum Dunes

Distributed by: Paramount Pictures

Release date April 6, 2018 (United States)

Country: United States

Language: American Sign Language

English

Movie Review:

True to its title, John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” tiptoes forward, camera fixed on the naked, padding feet of the Abbott family as they scavenge in a deserted supermarket. A title card announces Day 89 — of what, we don’t know — so we look for clues. Lee and Evelyn (Mr. Krasinski and his real-life wife, Emily Blunt) and their three children communicate urgently in sign language, and the youngest child’s interest in a battery-operated toy causes immediate alarm. Their fear is palpable, but what are they afraid of?

Thanks to that darned toy, we’re about to find out, in a perfectly executed attack sequence that establishes the stakes, and the family’s plight, with swift efficiency. Now minus one and watched by flapping posters of other missing souls, the Abbotts return to their farm as the story (by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) leaps forward more than a year. Evelyn is now preparing to give birth, Lee is teaching his son (Noah Jupe) to forage, and their daughter (played by the remarkable young deaf actor, Millicent Simmonds) is angrily chafing against her parents’ protectiveness.

A welcome alternative to the mind-shredding din of virtually any modern action movie, “A Quiet Place” is an old-fashioned creature feature with a single, simple hook: The creatures are blind, hungry and navigate by sound. Possessed of craniums that roll open to expose a pulsing, wet membrane, they’re like skittering ear holes with pointy teeth and clattering appendages. Drawing from a variety of heritage horrors, including “Alien” and “Predator,” their design is familiar yet effective, their origin kept shrouded. Extraterrestrial beings or man-made weapons gone rogue, they’re a mystery whose source the movie wisely recognizes as irrelevant.

Employing a narrative shorthand of news clippings, briefly whispered exchanges and critically placed devices — like a tiny oxygen mask to silence the new baby, and good luck with that — Mr. Krasinski (who helped write the screenplay) directs with skill and restraint. He knows that when the sound is turned down, we lean in, and he forces us to pay attention to facial expressions in a way that hearing audiences are rarely required to do. Welcoming this scrutiny, the actors emote like champs: Watching Ms. Simmonds cycle through hurt, doubt, anger and acceptance is one of the movie’s singular pleasures.

Photographed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen in soft, slightly faded tones that suggest a world slowly being erased, this stripped-down thriller operates from a central conceit that’s far from uncommon. From “The Walking Dead” to the Emmy-nominated “Hush,” a 1999 episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in which spindly supernatural killers steal people’s voices, the relationship between silence and survival has been repeatedly explored. More recently, movies like “It Follows” and “The Babadook” have used the absence of sound to create dreamy sequences that throb with unspoken menace.

Taking this device to an extreme that feels strangely novel, Mr. Krasinski imposes rigorous restrictions on his cast and crew that produce unexpectedly sensual benefits. The countryside around the farm is a symphony of wind and waterfall and rustling leaves; the production design inside the farmhouse is warm and intimate and crammed with evidence of the family’s intricate strategies to minimize risk. And the full-on action sequences, staged with stalking tension in settings as diverse as a grain silo and a bathtub, are nervily potent.

Neither intellectually deep nor even logically sound (press any soft spot and the whole plot caves in), “A Quiet Place” feels at odds with a musical score that too often wants to tell us when to jump, and how high. Yet in its convincing portrayal of a situation where a rusty nail is as lethal as an unexploded bomb, and the few remaining inhabitants seem — much like the audience — more likely to die of stress than anything else, the movie rocks. You may go in jaded, but you’ll leave elated or I’ll eat my words.

Plot:

In a dystopian alternate 2020, the world undergoes lockdown as blind monsters search for victims by sound. The few survivors of an unknown attack in the state of New York appear as the Abbott family, who mourn the death of Beau, a victim to the sound sensitive monsters a year earlier. Following several prior close calls, the monsters become aware of the family’s presence. Lee repairs Regan's broken Cochlear implant with scavenged parts on their rare forays into the abandoned town, boosting the signal with radio parts. In spite of granting this to his daughter Regan, and his insistence that Beau’s death was not her fault, tensions develop between Regan and Lee, causing her to feel isolated in the shadow of her brother Marcus.

Lee takes Marcus fishing, leaving Regan with her heavily pregnant mother despite her wanting to come too. At the river, behind the wall of sound at a waterfall, father and son can talk freely for the first time in months, and they discuss Beau's death and Regan's feelings of guilt. Marcus asks his father if he loves Regan, and that he should tell her that he does.

Production:

A Quiet Place is a production of Sunday Night and Platinum Dunes. Krasinski wrote the screenplay with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, both who had written the story. Beck and Woods grew up together in the US state of Iowa, and in college, they watched numerous silent films. By 2013, they began working on the story that would lead to the film. They used their experience growing up close to farmland as the basis for the story, also including a grain silo setting as a place considered dangerous in their upbringing. They initiated their approach with a 15-page proof of concept.

Marketing:

Paramount Pictures released the first trailer for A Quiet Place in November 2017. It aired a 30-second commercial for the film during the US football playoff Super Bowl LII on February 4, 2018. Of the seven trailers that aired during the playoff, A Quiet Place and Red Sparrow aired during the pregame and had the lowest views and social conversations. A Quiet Place had 149,000 views on YouTube, 275,000 videos on Facebook, and 2,900 social conversations. On February 12, 2018, Krasinski appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to present the full trailer for A Quiet Place.