A QUIET PLACE (2018)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
My favorite kind of horror film usually has locations in isolated, sometimes uninhabited areas, specifically the woods ("Evil Dead" and its brethren usually come to mind). So "A Quiet Place" already had me at the forest with a farm somewhere in the middle of it. Of course, the threat are giant creatures with tentacle-like legs and arms and an acute sense of hearing (they bare a resemblance to the monsters in "Stranger Things"), so if you drop a lantern in your farmhouse, these creatures speed through the horizon of corn stalks and trees like speed demons and arrive to destroy whoever caused the noise. Sounds like a B, C or Z-grade schlock yet with director John Krasinski involved, it is classy A horror dependent on the unexpected and finding the humanity in a tight-knit survivalist family at the center of chaos or, basically, silence to prevent chaos.
Krasinski plays the father, Emily Blunt the pregnant mother, and they have two children (one of them is deaf, played by real-life deaf girl Millicent Simmonds, and one other is killed in an alarming early sequence). They all communicate by sign language because any sound of verbal communication can cause these killer creatures to emerge (I am amazed that they can't whisper, wouldn't that sound be in line with walking barefoot on sand?) Actually any sound is problematic - dinner is served on lettuce leafs, footstep markers exist on stairs and floors where no creaky wood noise will ring, and sand footpaths are laid out, between their domicile leading to the bridge and the local uninhabited stores. This family is not completely alone - others live by and also have to live by silence. The real suspense kicks in when we know Emily Blunt will have to give a natural birth, and she may have to scream in agony!
Krasinski as a director and actor kept me on my toes throughout "A Quiet Place." The movie is an unnerving, shivering, truly nail-biting experience at just barely 1 and 27 minutes. It is probably the right length for an old-fashioned chiller and there are enough intimate family moments for everything to fall in place - a family we sympathize with and we hope this predicament is resolved. How it is resolved is one of the film's neatest surprises - all I can say is that it has to do with an improved hearing aid.
As a pure exercise in terror (especially the dynamic sound design and abbreviated uses of silence), "A Quiet Place" fills the bill. I don't know if it will become a classic but it will stand as one of the niftiest scare surprises of the 2010 era. Watch out for that protruding nail on the basements steps!
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