A Quiet Place 3 out of 4 stars
By Kyle Osborne
A Quiet Place, directed by the actor John Krasinski, who also co-stars with real-life wife Emily Blunt, may just be the most economical movie I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t tell you anything more than what you absolutely need to know to follow the characters, and it doesn’t waste time, coming in at a tight and just right 90 minutes.
Even the tag line is minimalist: “If they hear you, they hunt you.”
The movie starts at “Day 89,” a reference to some sort of apocalyptic event that has left the world sparsely populated—just a few unlucky people and some sort of monsters that hide in the woods and cornfields, quickly attacking and devouring anyone who makes a loud noise. Blunt and Krasinski are a Mom and Dad with their three kids. They’re inside an abandoned pharmacy getting medicine. The small town to which they’ve walked is like a ghost town in an old Western. On their way back home, one of their children makes the grave mistake of turning on a toy that makes a noise loud enough to bring out a fleet-footed creature. Big mistake. Huge.
What we had noticed right away is that the family are silent—tiptoeing in bare feet and communicating with each other in sign language. Most scary films amp up the tension with sound effects and creepy music, but the brilliance of A Quiet Place, is that it uses silence as its tension-builder, and the occasional sounds, no matter how small, as its biggest scares. Krasinski is a deft storyteller and displays an impressive mix of humor and heart. His work here is artful, but not the last bit fussy.
I’m going to keep this as short and tight as possible, in deference to the film’s ingenuous ways of making us care about a mostly silent family, making us scared to death of “monsters” that we only catch fleeting glimpses of (a good call—we don’t need to see them in order to fear them), and surprising us with the way things happen, even as it often telegraphs what will happen ( a pregnant Mom, a deaf daughter, a technically agile Dad will all figure into things somehow, that’s made clear well in advance).
It is important to say that this isn’t exactly a “Monster Movie” and it isn’t exactly a Horror film, and I’m so glad that it is neither. It’s something else. A thriller, I guess, but really just…something else.
With its PG-13 rating, the film earns its scares with not so much gore and only sporadic violence (and a bit of blood), just good old school filmmaking. I can’t remember getting so tense just by seeing a close-up shot of a nail sticking out from a basement stair.
Okay—that’s all I’m saying. Except for this: after a mostly silent film, the movie ends with sound! One of the most recognizable sounds you’ve learned from watching movies. And then it goes to black. And then you can breathe again.
A Quiet Place is rated PG-13 and runs 90 minutes.
Suggested drinking game: Take a shot every time a character puts a finger to their lips, making the international “shhh” gesture
Watch the trailer here:
Kyle Osborne