Movie Review: “A Quiet Place” is a tense, riveting horror debut
A family clings to survival in the intense monsters-in-the-dark thriller "A Quiet Place"
“Stay silent, stay alive,” proclaims an alarming newspaper front page, posted on a farmhouse wall. Leading a silent, post-digital existence in that farmhouse, the Abbott family — Evelyn and Lee (Emily Blunt and John Krasinski), and their children, Marcus, Regan, and Beau (Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds, and Cade Woodward) — have grown accustomed to heeding the warning. They communicate in sign language, move around only in their bare feet, and mark all the creaky floorboards on the stairs.
They’re the only humans stirring about their small town following some apocalyptic event, so they’re doing something right. Yet, whatever monsters lurk in the surrounding woods can’t be held at bay forever by silence. Someone at some point will make a sound. Whatever’s out there will hear it. And death might strike.
It’s a hyper-paranoid existence, tiptoeing through life fearful of triggering your own demise just by speaking up, or laughing out loud, or dropping practically anything. In John Krasinski’s riveting horror thriller A Quiet Place (★★★★), that burden falls heavily on the children, who naturally want to make noise in the world. Also, poignantly, it weighs a special burden on the parents who feel responsible for protecting their offspring from harm in their present hellscape.
Krasinski turns in an impressive feature filmmaking debut — more Get Out than It Comes at Night (and that’s a very good thing). While potently enigmatic, the script isn’t precious about withholding details, such as what exactly is out there hunting down humanity.
The film sustains an air of tension by immersing the audience in the same quiet the family endures. The Abbotts might be any family or faction, and their tormentors stand-ins for whatever boogeyman scares us, too. Enveloped in the silence with them, every sudden noise is chilling. Even more excruciating are the hazards you can see coming as time ticks slowly towards some noisy reckoning, as someone steps closer and closer to a nail jutting up from the stairs.
Several jump scares hit, and some miss, but that immersive feeling of anticipation and dread holds from beginning to end. The film is more taut than frightening, although Krasinski deploys a judicious amount of visual effects-assisted blood and brutality to elicit a few gross-out scares, hitting all the horror bases.
Still, A Quiet Place achieves a certain grace through its sound design and cinematography in adopting the various family members’ perspectives on silence, particularly that of daughter Regan, who happens to be deaf and is portrayed by Simmonds, who is deaf. Simmonds might be a standout in the tight ensemble, were it not the case that all the Abbott performances wrest attention and pull hard in opposing emotional directions.
Their survivalist lifestyle, holed up in the farmhouse, sometimes in the bunker-like basement, is a rich drama unto itself. Blunt’s Evelyn might be written as possessed of almost superhuman resolve and courage, but the actress, swooping down soon as Mary Poppins in a new Disney reboot, can make believers out of most.
She and Krasinski share soulful onscreen chemistry, no guarantee for a married couple, and make a formidable good cop/bad cop parenting team. They also freely express how much they love and depend on each other.
But no matter how hard Evelyn and Lee try, their message of unity might one day not get through to one of their kids, causing a disconnect that could lead to tragic consequences for everybody. Ultimately, A Quiet Place is the survival story of a family, not any number of individuals. They survive in constant fear, yet find ways to resist, hoping with every new day they might see an end to their living nightmare — but only if they stick together.
A Quiet Place is rated PG-13, and opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, March 23. Visit fandango.com.
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