That doesn’t mitigate much of A Quiet Place’s inadvertent silliness, but it does make its thrills refreshingly vicarious. You’re not in danger, but you might find yourself inadvertently behaving as if you were. A film that demands silence of its characters implicitly demands the same of the people watching it, and it’s strange, even admirable, how effective A Quiet Place can be when you realize that you’re holding your breath not only as a natural reaction to suspense, but in abidance of the rules of the movie. That seems like a miscalculation at first, but among Krasinski’s greater directorial coups is the sense that this initial silence implicates the audience in the story-to say nothing of immediately establishing what’s at stake. Krasinski’s film dares to spend its opening five or so minutes basked in complete silence, when candy wrappers in the theater are still being shredded open and the dozens of busy hands grabbing popcorn by the fistful can practically be heard out in the parking lot.
They’re more or less in the right.įeel free to shush them, however, for every other sound you’re inescapably bound to notice when a movie called A Quiet Place puts its back into the quiet part. If the other people in the theater are laughing instead of shrieking, please don’t shush them.
But half the thrill of watching it is admittedly in wondering whether Krasinski and his cowriters, Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, were trying to spare the SNL writers’ room the work of coming up with a parody.
Is the movie in on the joke? A Quiet Place is an engaging picture about how to live peacefully among monsters, making its release uncannily well timed to the Roseanne reboot, among other things. Parent Corner: Surviving the World of ‘A Quiet Place’ When a rusty nail sprang out of nowhere to ruin everyone’s day, I went catatonic. Ditto to a guffaw-worthy magical childbirth, and especially to the makeshift, soundproof crib devised for that occasion, which made me squeal at its inventive ridiculousness. A slow camera pan past the Abbotts’ many, many excruciating weeks of deep research and careful insight (from the whiteboard: “What are their weaknesses?” “SOUND”) makes it seem like the movie’s in on a joke very much worth telling about survival-as-genre. It’s a great premise: no rickety global backstory, no apocalyptic preamble, just these fucked-up ear monsters and the family trying to survive them.īut at this point in the history of movies, surely characters who scribble about two tweets’ worth of rudimentary evidence and rhetorical questions on a whiteboard in all caps, like junior detectives hot on the case of who stole their lunch money, can afford to be mocked just a little-monster or no monster. The sense of a diminishing local population, and of this family’s ranch as a last stronghold, makes the movie that much more tense and the characters’ mistakes that much more frustrating. Pretty inconvenient for the Abbotts, who aren’t the only survivors of this invasion-if that’s even the word for it-but who are essentially the only people we see.
One little sound, even a cough, and these monsters will come scrambling into your backyard like house cats hearing that promising first crack of a can of wet food being prised open.
The movie tells the story of the Abbotts, who are trying to survive a plague of unnamed and unexplained humanoid creatures endowed with an extremely keen sense of hearing, their ear canals expanding big enough to toss a baby through and their long, powerful legs ideal for scrambling to snatch up anything bold enough to make noise. Is A Quiet Place, the new horror film directed by John Krasinski, secretly a comedy? You wouldn’t think so from the marketing, which is all rustic doom and bearded gloom, post-human quietude with a side of Emily Blunt soundlessly mouthing screams.