Film Review: A Quiet Place

After working for a few hours on Saturday, I decided to check out A Quiet Place which opened this weekend.  I have been steering away from opening weekend films, but I know that horror films don’t generally do as well, so I figured I wouldn’t be too disturbed by the crowd.  Yes there are spoilers.

Before I continue, I will say this:  are you a woman contemplating that you will get pregnant one day?  Are you the parents of children?  If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, I would recommend that you never see this film.  You have been warned.

The film opens in the year 2020, and on what is called “Day 87”.  It is a violently abandoned ghost town with signs posted for missing persons, toppled stop lights and such.  A family (mom, dad, and three kids … a boy about 3, a boy about 5, and a girl around 10) are barefoot and quietly searching the pharmacy.  The girl is deaf, and has a hearing aid, which necessitates (among other reasons) that the family largely communicate in sign language. As mom searches for pharmaceuticals, the 5 year old climbs a shelf to get a toy space shuttle.  As they are about to leave, the father spies the toy, panics, and gently takes the toy form his son, removes the batteries, and leaves it behind, cautioning his son that the toy is too loud.  As the family leaves, the girl gives to the toy back to the son, and the son gently takes the batteries.

After walking for what appears to be several miles into the woods on the way home, they near a bridge, and as the family crosses, the son who is trailing behind, turns on the toy which emits some loud whistles and beeps.  The family panics as sounds can be heard in the trees.  The father drops everything and runs for his son, but is too late as a large creature streaks from the woods, snatches the boy, and disappears into the woods before the father can do anything.

Fast forward about a year.

We see that the family lives on a small farm with a farmhouse, a barn, and a silo.  Paths of sand mark paths where it is safe to walk, and certain parts of the floorboards are painted to show where to step to avoid creaks.  At night, the father climbs on top of the silo to light a gas signal fire, and sees similar fires appear on the horizon showing that they are not quite alone.

In the basement of the home, dad has an amateur radio hook up, and has been trying to raise anyone around the world without success.  We learn that these creatures are attuned to sound, but lack the sense of vision, and have wiped out much of the Earth’s population.  Their skin has numerous bulletproof exoskeletal plates.  The father has remote cameras hooked up around the vast property, and has determined that there are three such creatures in their area.  Dad has learned some engineering skill, and keeps trying to have working hearing aids for his daughter, but he is not wholly successful.  He has not been able to express his love for his daughter, and she is convinced that she is at fault for her brother’s death.  Mom is also pregnant, and is monitoring her health as her due date approaches.

The surviving son is frightened of their situation, but nonetheless is pressed into service to help his father gather fish from some river traps.  The daughter sees this as a slight against her, and ends up sneaking away to visit the memorial to her brother, leaving mom alone, against her parents’ wishes.

While father and son bond, and son tells dad that he must tell his daughter that he bears her no blame, mom goes into labor, and while running down the stairs steps on a nail, screaming in pain.  One of the creatures instantly shows up at the house, and mom must play a horrible cat and mouse game with the monster while trying to find some place to give birth.  She finally gets upstairs to the bathtub.

As dad and son return, they see mom has switched on the emergency lights, indicating trouble.  Son is dispatched to light off some fireworks from a long burning wick to draw the monsters away, while dad runs to the house.  Just as mom is giving birth and screams with the monster feet away, the fireworks display goes off, and the creatures are drawn away.  Dad gets to his wife and newborn, and rushes them to a hidden underground basement in the barn where they hope they can hide with a newborn.  Even though the creatures pursue them, there is enough sound insulation to protect them.

While daughter is racing home, she, unknowingly, encounters a creature (she can’t hear it, and it is behind her and can’t hear her.  Her hearing aid begins emitting a high frequency sound which even at low volume scares off the monster.

Daughter and son are able to meet up, and decide to wait for their father on top of the silo.   When she falls into the silo, and her brother jumps in to save her, another monster is attracted, but again, her hearing aid’s feedback causes the creature such distress, that it tears through the side of the silo, escaping.

Dad finds the kids, but they are found by another creature.  While the kids are able to hide in a truck, the father draws the monster away, and sacrifices himself for the kids, but not before signing that he loves his daughter.

The kids make it home, and meet up with mom and baby, but it isn’t long before baby makes some noise, attracting a creature.  The family hides in the basement, with mom toting a shotgun, and as the creature enters the basement, daughter is able to trigger her hearing aid.  With the monster in distress, she brings the hearing aid near her father’s microphone, and with the volume turned up, the creature is knocked unconscious, allowing mom to fire a shotgun blast at its head to kill it.

The mother sees on the remote camera monitors two creatures racing toward the house.  She nods to daughter, and cocks the shotgun, waiting to finish the job.

 

Roll credits.

 

This is an intense horror film, and there are particular scenes that I could never describe the tension in enough detail.  Sitting in the theater, you could hear the patrons (women in particular at some points) expressing the tension on the screen.  Here is the shock:  The mom is played by Emily Blunt and the dad (and the film’s director, directing only his second feature film) is played by John Krasinski.  Emily Blunt will be playing Mary Poppins in the long awaited Disney sequel coming soon, and might be best known for her roles in The Devil Wears Prada and Into the Woods.  John Krasinski is known for playing Jim Halpert on the US version of The Office.  Married in real life, this was their first chance to work together.  This is the exact opposite of the comedy/musical films they have been part of in the past, and this film does not really scream “family bonding moment” kind of entertainment.  For all of these reasons, I am pleasantly shocked at how good a film like this film turned out.

From a more technical standpoint, one would guess that the sound technicians would have had a simple time in working on a film that is largely silent.  However, sound is a big part of this film.  The sounds of nature are important backdrops in this film, and as we learn, most of the sounds of  nature don’t attract the creatures, so that humans use this to their advantage.  Music tends to be very understated in this film, allowing the focus to be on the visual of what is happening.

Speaking of visuals, one might guess that the monsters are at the focus of the film, but they aren’t. In many ways, they are generic monsters, suitably threatening when you see them, but not the focus of what is going on.  Much of the visual here is with the expressions on the actors faces.  It is an appreciated challenge to express oneself with physical action and little more than one’s face without over acting or creating confusion with the audience. Visual effects are truly at a minimum, and for a horror film, the gore is also at a minimum. In fact, we are never told where these creatures come from (space aliens?  From the center of the Earth?  A genetics lab? … it is wholly irrelevant, and it is completely ignored).

If the plot is somewhat thin, and the acting is great (albeit restrained) and there are no big visual effects shots, then what makes the film so great (and this is a great film)?  This film is 100% about setting a mood and building and selectively releasing tension.  A segue for a moment:

Quite a few people might be willing to compare this film to Ridley Scott’s Alien or John Carpenter’s The Thing.  Those films, in addition to being gothic horror masterpieces, are also something of a mystery.  Where is the alien?  Who is the alien?  This film dispenses with that.  We know these creatures are around, and sound will bring them coming.  This keeps the focus on the family.  In this sense while all horror films depend on building a degree of tension and dread, this is where A Quiet Place diverges from its classical gothic horror ancestors.

Back to my main point … as you may have guessed from my plot description, even the plot is rather thin … it is a snapshot of a couple of days in the life of a family under dire circumstances about a year apart.  There is no time spent searching for a way to kill the creatures … no desperate search for a safe place or a call to the military to save them.  The family is one of the most ordinary families you can find on film.  This is not a family of explorers or heroes or technicians and scientists.  This helps make the family very relatable, which I think is important since there is not a lot of character development.  This isn’t even a compelling “survival” story.  The whole point here is a measured raising and lowering of tension and mood to control what the audience is feeling.  In this, Krasinski hits a home run.

I think some of the best horror films prey on those things in our psyche that we can’t help … almost like a psychological bondage experience.  In John Carpenter’s The Thing, human familiarity and recognition are preyed on … what happens when everything you assume about the people around you (as in, they are actually human) is suddenly suspect … the feeling is horribly uncomfortable, and the audience begins to live that with the characters.  In Alien‘s best scene, the wonders of the miracle of birth are transferred with suddenness and shock to a male.  It is not something that is supposed to happen, and the violence of birth that women are designed to take takes on a new meaning when it is a male giving birth. What is natural and even joyful for one person is not so for another.

The “birth scene” will easily rank among the great scenes in horror film history.  Not having gone through child birth as a participant or witness, I can’t imagine what fears and anxieties a mother-to-be must be go through but rumor has it that child birth is loud and to some degree physically traumatic … now imagine having to go through this natural process that you have carefully planned for, alone, in complete silence, and having to somehow silence your child upon birth under threat of imminent evisceration.  It forces the audience to feel an emotion that is none to pleasant, and for that it is a remarkable scene.

Is there a weakness to the film?  Yeah … it isn’t perfect.  One wonders that for creatures that use sound so acutely that some scientist would have figured out their weakness before society was doomed (from newspaper articles, and missing persons posters, we learn that this cataclysm did not happen overnight).

This film relies on no mere jump scares, and there is no twist ending or post-credits epilogue.  A Quiet Place is what it is, and that is a first-rate psychological horror film that also happens to be a top notch gothic horror film … a rare combination!  You will leave having experienced something, even if that “something” is eerie dread.