REVIEW: A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place is a tender story about family bonds, dealing with loss, and forgiveness while also being a cutting edge creature feature.  The typical modern horror movie is very loud, with the quiet moments generally happening just before a boisterous scare attempt.  Noise is applied often in formulaic ways that actually make predicting jump scares an easy task.  There are some movies that stand out for how they use sound (I remember The Others was a great theatre experience because of this), and A Quiet Place is possibly the best example of utilizing audio to tell the story.

What we have is a family of five that are trying to live in a world where alien monsters have arrived and hunt people for food.  The creatures cannot see and use heightened hearing to find their meals.  People need to be quiet to survive, and the Abbott family has three children, and kids can't help but make noise at times.  The parents are Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and Lee (John Krasinski), and it is not long before something tragic happens to their family leading to friction between the father and Regan (Millicent Simmonds), the eldest daughter.  Regan is def, so the family knows how to use sign language, which comes in handy.

The majority of the film takes place on one day.  Evelyn is very pregnant, and there is a great deal of tension over when the baby is going to come.  With monsters hunting by sound, the audience knows that giving birth to a crying infant could mean death.  A lot of what happens in this movie comes down to the sounds that get made.  With almost everything quiet, the times when director John Krasinski taps into the small sounds of life, such as footsteps and children playing a board game make an impact.  The subtle noises make it so that when something loud happens it jolts us, being very alien to the experience we are a part of.  Everything we hear tells as much a tale as what we see.  Krasinski's attention to the auditory side of the film is masterful, and creates a full body interaction with the movie.

Playing off of the sound effects is the terrifying score from Marco Beltrami, who has had two Oscar nominations for his work on The Hurt Locker, and 3:10 to Yuma.  Even though the year isn't yet complete, I will already say that he deserves to be nominated for A Quiet Place, and he deserves the win.  What he writes weaves organically with the script, making the power of sound so dynamic and overwhelming.  It has been a while since I have heard a score as good as this one.

A Quiet Place is all around technically masterful.  The editing stands out through just how tight the shots move from one to another, with scenes ending just at a point that will have your brain imagining all sorts of things.  We get slow moments that last not a second too long, and taught build up to tense moments.  Exactly how this movie is composed and structured shows that Krasinski has a built in understanding of how long any scene or individual shot needs to be.

The story that is told is very touching, and I would only guess that for those out there who are parents, the movie may end up hitting the emotions more than it did for me.  I felt that through Krasinski's writing and the acting of everyone involved I understood the emotions of the parents.  Many people, while the events may not be as tragic as the Abbott's, can relate to the hurt that can arise and just how our relationships are affected.  Make sure you let others know how you feel, and embrace what you have.  The themes of family are strong, a deeply heartfelt voyage through a time of trial that just happens to have monsters as well.  The creatures aren't the real villain here.  The real antagonist is what happens when we don't know just how those close to us feel.

A Quiet Place may not have the smart social commentary written in Get Out, but that doesn't mean that it isn't as deserving for getting some Oscar nominations.  This is a film that is much more than the scares, a movie that brings the viewer on an emotional journey that has significant heft.  The power of the film, as well as the scares, comes from a combination of many different techniques that are all executed in a way that allows them to lean on each other.  All aspects of A Quiet Place are phenomenal, and they all serve each other, creating a masterful piece of cinema that is unmatched.

Rating - 4 out of 4 stars