A Quiet Place - This Week at the Movies

Part horror, part thriller, A Quiet Place sees writer-actor-director John Krasinski dead set on shredding your nerves… in silence.

Set in a post-apocalyptic 2020, the world goes quiet as blind, bloodthirsty aliens with extremely sensitive hearing invade the earth, hunting their victims by sound. A family of four must live a noiseless existence, communicating in sign language as they try to live as normal lives as they can – until the pregnant Evelyn (Emily Blunt) gets trapped in situation where silence is utterly impossible.

Pros:

• This is a properly cinematic experience. If you’re even slightly curious about spending the money to see this in a cinema, don’t think twice: do it. This is an almost exclusively silent film, and the atmosphere in your local multiplex will be like nothing you’ve experienced before: a genuine stillness, a genuine sense of tension, fear and worry. You’ll be concerned – in a good way – about how loudly you’re breathing as you strain to hear a clue as to whether your favourite character might be about to snuff it. Don’t bring any popcorn to A Quiet Place. Trust me.
• As well as being a genre piece, delivering shocks, scares and a pleasant sense of rollercoasterish anxiety, Team Krasinski’s movie is about something more than that, tackling what it feels like to be a parent, to care for a child, to be responsible for someone else’s life. Despite its outlandish high-concept premise, this film centres on an easily relatable group of characters that you’ll really care for. Deaf actress Millicent Simmonds stands out in particular, though Britain’s very own 13-year-old acting prodigy Noah Jupe – who you may recognise from The Night Manager, Wonder or Suburbicon – deserves some love too.
• Though this compliment so often sounds like a back-handed insult, part of A Quiet Place’s success is how it doesn’t outstay its welcome. This is a tidy, taut, tight 90-minute film that gets in and gets out. It’s scary, interesting and exhilarating, and in knowing it doesn’t need to say any more than it does in an hour and a half, it just works.

Cons:

• The “if they can hear you, they can hunt you” premise is not altogether new. 2016’s Don’t Breathe is the most obvious comparison – where a group of burglars attempt to rob a deaf man’s house – but there’s also the original Alien, the raptor kitchen sequence from Jurassic Park and countless other scenes from many other movies, not forgetting the classic Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode ‘Hush’. What A Quiet Place does that its rivals didn’t is go so long on the idea: there are possibly only a dozen spoken (or whispered) lines in this film. It truly is very, very quiet.
• If you approach A Quiet Place logically, there are some plot holes. You may not notice them on the first viewing, but perhaps on your second or third watch, they’ll really scream out at you. Needless to say, I won’t outline them here, and they’re not the worst of their kind… but they’re there.
• There’s a moment halfway through the film that is unintentionally humorous. Perhaps it’s an editing thing, but something happens in such a way that you can’t help but think “Huh?!” and let out a little laugh. It could easily be the desperate desire to release the tension whenever an opportunity presents itself, but it really is a bit odd.

Three word review: Incredibly tense excellence.