The monsters, it turns out, can hear everything but see nothing. In the second half, the movie turns into a more conventional alien-attack thriller, but if anything it becomes more rousingly effective. Krasinski, whose personality in the features he has directed (“The Hollars,” “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”) has always been a bit fuzzy, now brings himself into focus with the genre brinksmanship of “A Quiet Place.” He stages highly suspenseful scenes, like one involving Emily Blunt and a nail sticking out of the basement stairs, and another in a grain elevator, all of which should help position the film as a solid box-office performer. Her dad keeps trying, and failing, to build her an effective hearing aid, and when it explodes in feedback, that turns out to be one of the film’s quintessentially nutty yet endearing plot points: Who could have guessed the ultimate weapon against these monsters might be a Sonic Youth box set? Complications trickle in, like the Blunt character’s pregnancy, or the fact that the family’s daughter is deaf (she’s played by the intensely expressive deaf actress Millicent Simmonds). Even when they’re just communicating with their eyes, the devotion the members of this family feel toward each other is palpable. Night Shyamalan special like “Signs” or “The Village.” The most artful section of the movie is, in its way, the most challenging: the first half, in which the characters’ attempt to remain silent becomes a kind of deadly game. Where have the aliens come from, and how many of them are there? (Three, as it often seems, or three hundred?) Have they killed everyone in the world, or is their savagery limited to upstate New York? (At times the film’s ad line feels like it should be: “In the Hudson Valley, no one can hear you scream.”) And what about the government, the military - and, you know, advanced weaponry? More to the point: Why is it that human beings making non-human sounds will set off the aliens, but the sounds of nature don’t? How do they know a toy airplane is being held by a small child?Īll of which is to say: “A Quiet Place” has the smart/dumb, original/derivative, logic/anti-logic quality of a mid-period M.
And while not every supernatural set-up needs to be entirely explained (sometimes things are spookier if they’re not), in “A Quiet Place” even the basic rules of what’s going on, which we have to piece together by looking, periodically, over a wall of newspaper headlines, are pretty thin. Yes, sign language is real language, but the dialogue in “A Quiet Place” is naggingly minimal it doesn’t offer much room for character development or plot-thickening intrigue. When it hits us that this is going to be a movie about four people attempting to say as little as possible - call it the world’s first STFU horror film - it seems, frankly, like the conceit might be a bit of a drag. They take it away from him, but he sneaks it out of the store, and when they’re on the road back, crossing a bridge, the toy starts to make noise - at which point a spindly alien appears like a flash of lightning to rip the boy’s guts out.
They all look normal enough, except that everyone is barefoot, and remains so throughout the film, and they communicate in sign language.Īll appears stable until the younger son (Cade Woodward) makes the mistake of playing with a battery-powered airplane toy. But poking around the shadowy crannies of an empty grocery store is a family: Krasinski, the noble bearded father, and his wife, played by Emily Blunt (Krasinski and Blunt are married in real life), along with their three children. A picturesque main street in upstate New York has been abandoned - the eerie, bombed-out vibe is pure zombie-movie dystopia. It opens on Day 89 of a mysterious invasion. (Why is it that a crashing waterfall can mask any telltale sound, but when the family is behind the walls of their farmhouse, even their whispers risk being heard?) Yet sometimes, getting on the clever/whatever wavelength of a horror film and just rolling with can be a part of the fun.
The more you look at it, though, the more you see that “A Quiet Place” is at once catchy and contrived, ingenious and arbitrary. The film generates a free-floating dread out of the fact that almost every sound a character makes is potentially deadly. “A Quiet Place” is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.
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