Director John Krasinski, left, also portrays the father of a family that mustn’t make a peep.
Welcome to a whole new apocalypse.
Humanity has been contemplating its own end since before we could even pull it off ourselves (with nuclear weapons or genetically engineered viruses, or whatever). But we have never conceived of anything like this before.
What is happening in A Quiet Place is that humanity is being hunted by hideous monsters who are blind but have incredibly sensitive hearing. (The movie keeps the creatures hidden for a very long time, which is far more horrible than if it kept showing them off.) As we meet the family of survivors A Quiet Place is centered around, they are scavenging a shop in a small upstate New York town that appears entirely depopulated. Mom (Emily Blunt) and Dad (John Krasinski) and kids — a preeteen girl (Millicent Simmonds), a boy (Noah Jupe) and a tyke barely out of toddlerhood (Cade Woodward) — are all barefoot, the better to muffle their footfalls. They communicate only through sign language. They have to be careful not to drop anything that might clatter and bang. Later, we see that their farmstead house and surroundings have been soundproofed as much as possible: painted markings on the wooden floors to show where it’s safe to step without creaking; paths through the fields and between house and barn marked out in sand to prevent crunching of leaves and twigs; a Monopoly board with felt playing pieces; dinner served on cloth, not on dishes that might clank.
It’s impossible to overstate how remarkable this is, what an audacious choice for Krasinski, who also directs, to have made. (He wrote the screenplay with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck.) What is a horror movie without screaming? What, they can’t use guns to fight the monsters? And then comes an unexpected noise, and it is bone-chilling, a horror in itself. Will it draw the monsters? Any sound outside surely means that it has. Instead of sound having to be amplified to be scary, any sound here has the power to cut right through you. The stillness and calm of the life of this family only magnifies their terror.
There isn’t a single aspect of this movie that isn’t brilliant and perfect. It opens on “Day 89” of the end of the world, skipping past the part of the story that we will have seen too many times before to have been surprised by it yet again: It will have been all rampaging monsters and, yes, people screaming and the usual disaster junk, and we didn’t need to see that. And then it jumps to “Day 472,” truly in the thick of what will be fresh extrapolations of its already inventive scenario.
This apocalypse is unlike anything we’ve cinematically experienced before, and so is the gentle way it plays out. It’s hardly a nice end of the world, obviously, but humanity has been literally unable to descend into a Mad Max–style every-man-for-himself dystopia: that would be too noisy. This is a movie about the absolute need to work together to survive, of the bonds of family as life-giving. But there are hints of other survivors: Signal bonfires light up the landscape around this family’s farm in the evenings, a silent “hello, we’re still here” from afar. All hope has not yet been lost.
On the other hand, Krasinski finds unexpected dread in that hope, too: By Day 472, Mom is quite heavily pregnant. How is she going to give birth without making any noise? How are they going to stop a newborn from wailing out loud constantly? How many new challenges does survival demand?
A Quiet Place is frequently excruciating in its terror. I am only very rarely able to say that about movies that are meant to frighten us. This one scared the hell out of me. That is so wonderfully refreshing.
