Review: A Quiet Place

Less is usually more when it comes to horror. Nightmares don't require extensive backstories and lengthy explanations to scare the crap out of you. But turning a scary idea into a scary film is harder than it looks, and even when the idea seems sure-fire sustaining tension for an entire movie is something not even the best directors can pull off.

So while A Quiet Place isn't as fun or as memorable as many of the classic horror films of recent years, the one thing it is - and it's the one thing that makes it a must-see for horror fans - is relentlessly, brutally scary. There's no jokes, no snappy dialogue (there's almost no dialogue at all), the bare minimum of character development and what backstory there is you can get by just fine without. It's ruthless when it comes to cranking up tension; this is the rare film where the people around me (and yes, me too) were flinching at literally everything by the final half hour.

What if there were supremely lethal monsters everywhere and the only thing that attracted them to you was sound? It’s day 89 of this unpleasant situation, society has crumbled, almost everyone is dead and for the Abbott family a quiet trip into town for medicine has a dramatic ending when their youngest takes a shine to a battery-powered toy spaceship.

 

Cut to a year and a half later and life on the Abbott’s farm remains on a knife-edge: Lee (John Krasinski, who also directs) is working on building a working hearing aid for deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds, who's deaf in real life), who blames herself for what happened to her youngest brother. That makes her other brother Marcus (Noah Jupe) sad, while their mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is very pregnant. But mostly they remain very, very quiet (and talk with sign language), which means that any loud noise is jarring to hear (for the audience) and potentially fatal (for the family). 

 

Often films like this run through their ideas and fizzle out before the end. A Quiet Place doesn't have a whole lot of ideas - and some are never really explored; surely someone who was deaf would be more at risk of accidentally making a loud noise? - but Krasinski does an excellent job of wringing every possible drop of tension from them. Floorboards are noisy; giving birth is noisy; impaling your foot on a nail is noisy. Once that's been established, it's just a matter of making us squirm while we wait for the inevitable.

Much of what makes this drawn-out drama suspenseful rather than frustrating is the way it doesn't cheat. Making a sound is a fatal mistake, but it's one that's very easy to make. Walking around barefoot might not be the best idea, but in a world where sound equals death it's a reasonable choice to make; likewise when you've lost one young child deciding to have another is understandable even if babies aren't exactly known for their stealthy qualities.

But this wouldn't be half as effective without the performances. Krasinski honed his silent acting on nine seasons of The Office, and he puts those face-pulling skills to good use here as a man struggling to hold it together. Blunt is even better, but they're both outshone by Simmonds, who becomes the emotional core of the film without speaking a word. Her performance cranks up the tension even further; when someone this good is on screen, everyone else is expendable.

Anthony Morris