A Quiet Place (2018)
Directed by John Krasinski, who stars with real life wife Emily Blunt, A Quiet Place has crept up on the box office and reportedly had the best opening weekend of the year since Black Panther. Proof that positive buzz and good old fashioned word of mouth still has the power to make a genre outing a surprising success.
So is it any good? The answer is yes. In fact it’s very good. Smart and efficient and clocking in at a spritely 98 minutes – take note, please, a horror doesn’t need to be any longer than this – A Quiet Place packs a punch both in the fear stakes and also emotionally. Set in the near future where the planet has been invaded by spider-like creatures who are blind and hunt on sound alone, we’re thrown straight into the action as the Abbott family forage for supplies in an abandoned supermarket in a small town in rural USA. Evelyn (Blunt) and Lee (Krasinski) lead their three children barefoot and on tip-toes silently back through the woods towards home, a farm in the middle of nowhere. But tragedy strikes and we’re introduced to the terrifying alien threat in one swift and brutal attack…
Cut to months later and the Abbotts are picking up the pieces and surviving in silence, but to add another complication, Evelyn is now heavily pregnant. And newborn babies are not known for their silence… It won’t be a huge spoiler to reveal that when the baby comes along everything goes to shit and the Abbotts are thrown into a rapidly escalating battle with the monsters that lie in wait. And not all of them will survive to the finish.
A Quiet Place takes its time to get going but once the attacks begin there is barely room to breathe. The tension is hiked up to the power of ten as Krasinski’s script, refreshingly low on dialogue but a tad high on sentimentality, throws some pretty nifty set-pieces our way. The family take on the aliens in corn-fields (hello Shyamalan and Stephen King), grain-silos, a flooded basement, and at one point even in a bathtub…
The premise – sound can kill – means the film absorbs its audience whilst at the same time encouraging them to be quiet! Who knew? In the rapidly infuriating multiplex culture of keeping the film noisy to cover the smart-phone obsessed chattering bag-rustling masses, here’s a film that actually quite cleverly silences its viewers. So not only are you more immersed in the action, but you’re actually less obnoxious at the same time. Win win!
The movie brings the scares, the tension, and excellent performances by the young cast who play the Abbott kids tug at the heart strings. Deaf actress Millie Simmonds is especially touching as daughter Regan (where have we heard that name before) who’s disability could prove to be the ultimate undoing of the marauding creatures.
Being a hardened cynic I found some of the more sentimental moments a little queasy, but don’t let that put you off. This surprising and smart horror movie revels in treating genre fans to all the right tropes in all the right places, and reminds the jabbering masses that silence is golden.
Now shut the fuck up and watch the damn movie.
(JL)
SCREAMING QUEENZ 