Review: A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place (2018)

Rated PG-13 for terror and some bloody images

Score: 4 out of 5

A Quiet Place marks, together with Get Out, the moment at which "post-horror", a movement in horror cinema that began in the independent scene, broke through to the mainstream in a big way. Often willfully defiant of modern horror trends, post-horror hearkened back to the '70s and earlier in its focus on creeping dread over in-your-face frights and production values over low-budget grit. Such films were typically successful by indie standards, but never the blockbusters that mainstream horror films were, and those mainstream audiences often saw them as too slow-paced and "not scary"; more often than not, they became cult classics more than anything. Of all people, it took John Krasinski on this film and Jordan Peele on Get Out, both of whom have backgrounds in comedy rather than horror, to take the language of post-horror and successfully translate it to box office success. Here, we have a film where there is not a word of dialogue until twenty-four minutes in (in the form of a song played on a character's earphones), and not a word spoken by the main characters until thirty-eight minutes in; most of the film is in American Sign Language with subtitles. In other words, a film that your average Joe and Jane moviegoer should've hated.

And yet, whereas post-horror often plays around with the boundaries of genre, this is unmistakably a horror film, and an extraordinarily effective one at that. It's rated PG-13, and yet I never felt that it needed to show anything more than it did, such was the quality of Krasinski's work behind the camera. It packs some big, ugly-ass monsters, and while the characters felt thinly written, the performances by their actors were absolutely outstanding, especially given how little spoken dialogue they had. And above all else, it makes outstanding use of its central conceit, monsters who hunt by sound and thus require the main characters to remain as silent as possible -- and causes viewers to do the same, a fact that even the most jaded moviegoers and film journalists immediately noted. I wouldn't call A Quiet Place a revolutionary film, but it is still an exemplary one in a time that has had no shortage of great horror films.

The film takes place just over a year after an alien invasion has wiped out human civilization. These aliens are blind, feral monsters who hunt by sound, and their thick armor shells make them nearly impervious to bullets and bombs. The focus is on a family in upstate New York, the Abbotts, comprised of the father Lee (John Krasinski), mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt), daughter Regan, and son Marcus. Regan is deaf, meaning that the entire family knew how to communicate using sign language before the invasion, which turns out to be an invaluable survival skill given the nature of the monsters that now prowl the woods around their farm. Unfortunately, Regan being deaf means that she was unable to notice her little brother Beau playing with a loud, battery-operated toy that she gave him in the early days of the invasion, which quickly got him killed and left her with a mountain of guilt.

If there's a single flaw about this movie that kept it out of the ranks of the classics, it's that it didn't spend enough time focusing on this part of Regan, given how important she is to the entire plot. We're shown early on that she's still kicking herself over what had happened, partly thanks to her decision to give her brother that toy (even if him putting the batteries back in wasn't her fault), and the film does try to go in some interesting directions with this, with Lee unaware of what his daughter is going through and Marcus trying to explain it to her. The problem comes in how most of the film is focused on Lee and Evelyn, the former as he tries to find a way to communicate with survivors in the rest of the world and the latter as she manages the late stages of her pregnancy, knowing that a screaming baby can easily get everybody killed (the family built a soundproofed nursery in the basement of the barn for just this occasion). Regan's grief becomes important later on, but so much of the film before then didn't concern her that, when Lee has to make a pivotal decision during the climax, I didn't quite feel the emotional weight that the film was going for. I've noticed that this seems to be a recurring trend in the writing of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who co-wrote this with Krasinski), tilting towards giving their characters emotional depth but not really finding a way to pull it all together at the end; their later film Haunt (which they also directed) had the same problem.

That said, just as Beck and Woods' direction saved Haunt, so does Krasinski's work directing this film. This isn't his first time behind the camera as either a director or writer, but all of his previous work has been in either comedies or dramas, and yet his work here is outstanding by any standard. Given the nature of this film, it depended on excellent sound design to put a chill in viewers' spines, and he makes great use of the quiet, isolated nature of the setting, one where death may be lurking around any corner. I truly felt while watching this film that one wrong move or loud noise could get the characters -- and me -- killed. False jump scares would've destroyed the effect, and the film wisely almost never employs them; a loud jolt is always a sign that the main characters are in trouble, only on one occasion used to signify anything mundane (and the film earned that one moment). The film thinks through everything about the characters' lives in a world where they must make as little noise as possible, the reliance on sign language being only the start; the Abbotts have built a soundproofed nursery in their barn's basement in anticipation of the noise that Evelyn's baby will make after she gives birth, they walk barefoot and lay trails of sand on the ground to mask their footsteps, the noise of a waterfall and a rushing river allows them to speak normally when standing near it (in one of the few scenes of spoken dialogue in the film), and they even painted the steps and floorboards inside their house so that they know where to step without causing them to creak. As a dark and deeply unsettling mood piece, this film doesn't need gore to deliver the goods. Krasinski and the rest of the cast also do a great job (though casting his real-life wife Emily Blunt to play his on-screen wife may be cheating when it comes to establishing them as a couple), their lack of dialogue, if anything, giving the film more room to focus on the day-to-day struggle of survival and flesh out their daily routines.

And while the film initially keeps the monsters lurking just off-screen, showing them only in brief glimpses, in the second half of the film it's proudly showing them off in all their glory, and the special effects work is admittedly derivative but still well-done. The xenomorphs from the Alien films may be an obvious point of reference for a truly monstrous, inhuman alien, but there's a reason why H. R. Giger's designs are so enduring, and that's because you only need one shot of their rows of long, sharp teeth to know that these monsters are not to be messed with. The effects were top-notch, and the aliens themselves obey a very particular set of "rules" with regards to how they operate that the film sticks to, including some effective (if blunt) foreshadowing of what their weakness is. We're never told what they are, where they came from, or why they're here, but the fact that I was easily formulating theories and answers in my head meant to me that they had the right mix of elements to be intriguing without being over- or under-explained.

The Bottom Line

A Quiet Place will likely go down as a modern classic in the horror genre, not only for its unique premise but also for how well it delivers on it. While the writing may be a bit thin, everything else capably carries it not just to the finish line but to the podium.