A Quiet Place Review

This past week, I went and saw that Jim Halpert-helmed horror film you’ve all been hearing about: A Quiet Place.  Sporting a whopping 95% on a large number of critics’ reviews, it’s a film I would have been excited to see even without the critical acclaim, and based solely on the merits of its awesome trailer.  As previously promised, here are my relatively undesired, but nonetheless regurgitated, thoughts.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Daddy’s gonna make sure you don’t get heard.

The sky-high level of tension persistently maintained throughout A Quiet Place is made starkly clear almost immediately, with a whisper-silent first scene devoid of any combat or monster noises –  you’ve come to expect this based on the trailers, but it still packs quite the punch nonetheless, and I quickly had to second-guess my candy crunching about five minutes into the film, which is especially impressive considering that the candy wasn’t even all that crunchy (Reese’s Pieces).  Perhaps the single best and most noteworthy thing about A Quiet Place is its level of dedication to its undeniably unique premise.  The scares are largely elemental, and (perhaps surprisingly) there are also a lot of loud jump scares, but the extreme quiet of the majority of the film gives those brief punches of noise that much more chutzpah, and turns a number of scares that may seem fairly commonplace into truly terrifying and closer to one-of-a-kind events.

John Krasinski pretending he’s in a sweater commercial but really it’s a horror movie that he wrote and directed.

A Quiet Place also takes full advantage of its premise in its writing.  The original script for the film only had one line of verbally spoken dialogue, and while there’s a bit more than that in the finished cut, the majority of the conversations being had are via sign language, which if anything works to the film’s benefit.  It’s frankly transfixing to see how much emotion – and more often than not, desperation – can be put into the movements required to say a line of dialogue that I and/or a two-year-old (but really, what’s the difference?) probably could have written, but even more powerful than what’s said is what’s left to say.  How would you express a wide range of emotions without sound?  Fear?  Sadness?  Joy?  Pain?  Some of the heaviest and most frightful moments in A Quiet Place involves its characters grappling with just that.  I did wonder aloud, though, why the Halpert family didn’t just pack up and move down to the nearby roaring waterfall, which is demonstrated in the film to at least mildly increase the sense of safety from the super-hearing monsters of unknown origin plaguing the planet.

Imagine you’re in a corn maze, but every time you make a sound you probably die.  That’s what the world of A Quiet Place is like.

The bulk of the emotional weight of the film, particularly in its more somber family-oriented sequences, is shouldered primarily by writer/director/leading man John Krasinski and his wife, Emily Blunt.  I’ll admit that I was at least mildly concerned that I’d be unable to separate Krasinski from our beloved prankster Jim (especially after seeing a number of memes making that connection more concrete using certain scenes from The Office), but be it due to the stunning beard or the overall acting prowess, my consternation was quickly dispelled.  The real hero of the story, though – at least in my opinion – is Blunt’s character, a truly fierce matriarch who puts up with difficulty after difficulty throughout the film, including but not limited to the mammoth task of silent child-birth and the subsequent silent child-rearing.  This is an element of A Quiet Place‘s story that a number of people may take issue with – the viewers are immediately confronted with the question of why two responsible adults would put themselves in a potential loud and logistically problematic pregnancy situation in the middle of a newly manifested alien crisis that seems to have killed many people.  I’ll admit that it’s a fair as heck question, but it’s one that I was willing to look past.

Emily Blunt wondering why she chose to birth a child during an apocalypse.

Also of note acting wise is that of the three children, played by Millicent Simmonds (Wonderstruck), Noah Jupe (Wonder, Suburbicon), and Cade Woodward.  Of particular mention is the work of Simmonds, who as a deaf actress plays a deaf character.  It’s an authenticity-adding detail you may have already heard about online, but it’s cool and seemed worth bringing up all the same.  It’s also worth saying that Simmonds’ character is in itself incredibly compelling, both for the surface reasons (a deaf character in a sound-based quandary) and due to the growth the character experiences.  While Blunt and Krasinski’s characters have arguably predictable arcs and fairly simple motivations of “keep the kids safe,” Simmonds’ character possesses more depth.  Her character also taught me a great deal about a new fear of mine: being buried alive in a grain silo.  Who knew that the grain in a grain silo was basically quicksand that will suffocate you the first chance it gets?  Sheesh.

Emily Blunt pointing at the tip of her nose instead of handling impending crisis.

Simply put, there are quite a few good things to say about A Quiet Place, and summarizing them results in a prediction that it may well be the horror movie of the year.  While its sound mixing, editing, and score are all as good – if not better – than they need to be for the film to stay afloat, I sadly doubt they’ll earn much in the way of nominations or awards, but who knows.  At a brisk 95 minutes, it’s also pleasantly short, not biting off more than it can chew, but rounding things out quite nicely with an absolutely stellar action-packed ending featuring nonstop badassery from Blunt.  It’s cleaning up at the box office after being produced on what was surely a meager budget (when your cast only has six members, you’re bound to save a buck, even when two of them are John Krasinski and Emily Blunt), and is likely to stay in theaters for a while longer yet, so check it out if you can.

As for next week – TWC is taking a brief hiatus (end-of-semester craziness!), but after that, the Infinity War looms.