Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “A Quiet Place” is Suspense Done Right
Year: 2018
Genre: Horror
Directed: John Krasinski
Stars: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, Leon Russom
Production: Platinum Dunes
A Quiet Place is one of those rare movies that is a pleasure to watch but a sonovab***h to review. It’s expertly crafted; a well-plotted suspense thriller full of atmosphere, written with intelligence and acted with aplomb by all actors involved. It’s so well crafted in fact, that revealing anything including what’s in the trailers will pull at certain threads that need not be pulled. It’s so tightly written, everything is important. So I’ll say If you’re one of those people who read reviews before you watch the movie – stop. Watch the movie, skip watching the trailer again and just go watch it. Yes even you who’s not that into horror movies, go watch it through your fingers if you have to.
What can be gathered from the trailer is that the film follows a tight-knit upstate New York family, forced to live in absolute silence. There’s the stalwart plaid-wearing father (Krasinski), the tough, resourceful and very pregnant mother (Blunt) and three children (Simmonds, Jupe and Woodward) all of whom cannot make a noise…ever. If any one of them snaps a twig, stubs a toe or talks, vicious monsters come out of the nearby woods and whisk them away most likely to devour them.
Knowing this already has you knowing too much – the premise bakes into the mechanics of the plot so seamlessly into the story as a whole that they become crucial. Any screenplay worth its salt meticulously sets up series of setups and payoffs. But what A Quiet Place’s script, written by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck does is it launches into its setups and payoffs then leaves them standing. It’s like a minefield that hasn’t been cleared long after war. The deafening silence combined with exposed dangers and a natural lack of communication leads to unfathomable amounts of stress for the characters and an almost un-ingestible amount of suspense for the audience.
I won’t name any examples but I ask you just at a glance, how many things in your periphery right now, are capable of making noise? What could you do to prevent the familiar creak of a door, the zip of a zipper, the scrape of porcelain plate on porcelain plate? Would you stow things away? Sound-proof your stuff? Put everything on a shelf down on the floor? Imagine trying to live that way. Try as you might, there will always be the risk something will sound and with that comes immediate death at the hands of a deadly enemy.
As for the enemy themselves, director/lead John Krasinski does an excellent job exposing them in pieces as opposed to a large, spindly whole. Much of the time we’re exposed to them through their impact whether it is through the clomping of their gigantic hind legs or through their ability to slice straight through steel with ease. When the creatures are finally visible, the special-effects team must have worked overtime to make sure their CGI monsters remained the stuff of nightmares. In retrospect, they look a little too much like a mix between the creatures from Stranger Things (2016-Present) and Cloverfield but at least they’re north of The Mummy (2017).
Again, I’m saying too much and I would behoove you to just watch A Quiet Place for yourself to judge the story through the pulpiness of its premise and the resourcefulness of its execution. Just keep in mind, the true magic of A Quiet Place is not that it gets you to an anxious place but rather that it keeps you there and leaves you whimpering in your seat.
Final Grade: A-
Author
I am just an ordinary man with maybe a little too much time on my hands, forcing myself to watch as many movies as possible.
