A Quiet Place is a 2018 thriller about a family who is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.
After Jordan Peele won big for Get Out last year, we have another television comic in the director’s chair in this latest horror feature. That man is John Krasinski, who is best known for playing Jim in the U.S. series The Office. Teaming up with co writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Krasinski helms a movie with a great premise, but ultimately comes up short on its promise.
The setup is simple: Alien creatures have arrived and are killing off the global population, hunting their prey by tracking sound. Lee Abbott (Krasinski), along with his wife Evelyn (played by real life wife Emily Blunt) have survived for years in silence with their children Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe). The family has another child early in the picture, but he might as well have been wearing a red shirt from Star Trek because he is taking out in the first five minutes. This is not a spoiler since they showed it in the trailer. Plus what he and Regan do is … well, I’m sorry but he kind of deserved it, but hey, it gives us our first kill and you can’t have a horror film without a kill right away. Cut to many months later and the family is trying to get by. Regan is still upset about causing the death of her little brother and Lee has spent many hours soundproofing their home and working on ways to find a weakness in the creatures.
It was really cool to see a movie released in major theaters that is subtitled for at least 45 minutes of it’s 90 minute run time. I liked that Krasinski had his cast do this and didn’t create some sort of device where they could speak to each other. It was also clever how they used natural things in nature to hide their voices and carry on conversations with with each other as well. There is some good sound design that works, but it’s the usual tropes that happen in every horror feature – wait til everything is quiet and than have a big noise to shake everything up.
In the movie, we learn that Evelyn is having another baby. This is nothing more than a lazy plot device to find excuses to bring tension to the story. I find it hard to believe that this couple would be so irresponsible as to bring in another life into this kind of world. You might think, “Well when you’re in love with someone, you find ways to make it work” or “She was feeling so heartbroken with the death of her son, she wanted something to fill that void.” However, these creatures hunt you down by the sounds you make. What do babies do at least 75% of the time? They cry and although Evelyn and Lee take precautions to damper the sounds, there are just way too many times that baby is used as a narrative device for the creatures to hunt so we can feel sympathy for this family. I’m sorry, but I had none.
There is a bit of tension between Lee and Regan that is never fully explored and is lazily resolved without any real explanation. They don’t even spend much time together. There is a scene near the beginning where she asks if she can go with him and he declines. We learn about their issues through exposition dialog from Marcus when we should be hearing it from Lee or Regan. Father and daughter don’t meet up until the end, where they have a small reconciliation, but it feels too late. The acting is good but there was no real build up and therefore, I didn’t care. More so, I should want to care about their safety, but I didn’t.
A Quiet Place has many moments where it sets up something bad to happen, filking in the gaps with random jump scares. To be fair, there were moments that surprised me, but just because you make a person jump once, doesn’t mean they are going to do it again. Whenever I re-watch Jaws, I always jump when that head in the boat appears, even though I know when the scene is. That moment always works. It’s about suspense. Too many modern filmmakers don’t know how to do it.
I think John Krasinski is a good director and he does a fine job with the cast, but this might have been better as a 30-minute short. If you want better, check out Don’t Breathe from a few years ago.