A Quiet Place

The premise of this year's A QUIET PLACE is intriguing, but raises endless questions.   It's the near future.  Alien-like creatures attack and obliterate anything that makes a noise over, say, twenty decibels.  Most of the Earth has been wiped out, cause, you know, people tend to sneeze, laugh, and pass gas.  Somehow, the Abbotts and their three children have remained quiet enough to survive in their remote homestead.  Not that there aren't close calls.  Then one day, a tragedy.  The youngest, Beau, allows a toy space shuttle to make beeping sounds.

Regan, who is deaf, blames herself for the incident, having returned the toy to her brother after dad, Lee, took it away.  Dad may harbor some (unspoken, of course) resentment toward his daughter.  But Lee and his wife Evelyn move on, and when we resume the narrative a year later, she is pregnant.  This may make viewers take pause, rightly wondering why, given their current state of silent living, bringing a screaming baby into the world is a good idea.    As the movie continues, it will be up to you if this is a script contrivance to elicit more tense scrapes or a further development of the unmissable theme.

Director/co-writer/star John Krasinski, who plays the family patriarch, has been quite open about his intentions for what the movie is about.  He's alluded to political statements (and the idea of Big Brother type surveillance was one I discerned), but everything, traditional horror film tropes and all, has been designed to suit an essay on family - its importance, necessity for the very survival of mankind, etc.  Does this make it a family friendly film? For the most part, though (impressive) images of the creatures and Marco Beltrami's eerie scoring might creep out the preteens.

As effective as those elements are, they do limit A QUIET PLACE, prevent it from becoming something truly unique.  The first half hour is nearly silent, which by many reports was a real challenge for the popcorn munchers and candy wrapper crinklers in theaters.  For that reason I'm happy I waited to watch this at home, though Krasinki's success at creating an atmosphere of fear and tension would've been even better in a darkened auditorium.  There's an old school method at work here, which includes the obligatory sudden loud noises and jump out of the dark startles to catch the audience off guard.  It generally works.  Even when the movie feels like recycled Spielberg by way of Shyamalan or J.J. Abrams.

Krasinski's real life wife Emily Blunt plays Evelyn, and handles her part quite well, even as things get all horror movie-ish in the later scenes.  I liked A QUIET PLACE well enough, but a very different movie, one where things were less seen and heard, might've been something extraordinary.