A Quiet Place (2018) - Review
Originally published June, 2019The common idiom goes "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Ever since A Quiet Place came out last year, I get the feeling that other movie makers wanted to do something similar when it comes to focusing on human senses, especially Netflix. Birdbox was a meme-worthy Netflix movie that managed to get a fair amount of attention, both positive and negative, which played with the idea that people could no longer use their eyes and vision to survive. There's enough of a difference from Birdbox and A Quiet Place that you wouldn't call it a rip off, but now, there's another horror movie on Netflix called The Silence, in which horrific creatures that are attracted to the slightest of sounds hunt humans. Sounds like a rip-off, right? Well, before we go any further, let's get our facts straight. The book for Birdbox came out in 2014 and the book for The Silence came out in 2015, while the movies began filming in October and September of 2017, respectively. A Quiet Place was not based on any book and was filming May to November of 2017. So, who is imitating whom?
You could spend all day wondering who first came up with the idea of monsters that have something to do with one of your particular senses. You could also go down the rabbit hole of finding all the other movies that have coincidentally come out over the years with similar premises and titles. However, for the purposes of this website, all of that is irrelevant. I'm only interested in whether or not the films are any good and I couldn't really care less which one came first. So, what then is the verdict on A Quiet Place?
Pros
Good acting from the entire (small) cast, including the children
Intentional silence of the film plays to the tension
Good music when the music is active
Movie length and pacing is really good and makes the experience pass quickly
Creature designs are slightly more interesting than the initial impression
Some details used in physical and atmospheric storytelling work really well
Cons
Creatures are still a little boring looking and are seen a lot more than I'd recommend in a horror film
Some amateurish attempts at atmospheric storytelling techniques are distracting
The amount of disbelief one must suspend is excessive
Plot & Thoughts
Before the title card of the film appears, A Quiet Place sets the mood with a scene of near silence. The protagonists and their children scavenging through an abandoned drug store for supplies. The mother (Emily Blunt) is finding pills for their sick son (Noah Jupe), while the oldest daughter (Millicent Simmonds) keeps an eye on the youngest boy (Cade Woodward) wandering the store and making sure he doesn't make too much noise as the father (John Krasinski) keeps watch. It's clearly shown that the daughter has a cochlear implant, which serves as a hint to the audience that she has a hearing disability and provides a simple justification for why this family is fluent in ASL. A Quiet Place is full of physical details like this that are presented in a matter-of-fact, but silent way. Some of these moments of physical storytelling through background details, like the idea of gathering sand and pouring it down the frequently walked paths to muffle your footsteps works well. However, there are some other details, which we'll get to, that are overtly distracting in how needless or thoughtless they are.
While everything seems to go well at the store and the family gets what it needs, a tragedy occurs that is surprising to no one, except the characters. This tragedy shows us the sound-sensitive monsters that the family is so desperately trying to avoid, and it also sets up an underlying character conflict/goal for the big event of the film that occurs later. Fast-forward almost a year, and the family has continued to survive in a world filled with monsters and with very few human survivors. Everyone seems to be trying hard to live as regular a life as they can, but there are a few obvious issues. One is that the daughter feels guilt over the tragedy that occurred and is lashing out as you would expect of a teenager.
The other obvious and seemingly disastrous issue is that the mother is pregnant with another child. Again, this is a physical detail that we only see, but all the baggage that comes with this detail and why it might be a problem is in the heads of the audience. Nothing needs to be explained to us about why this might be disastrous in a world where monsters come running at the slightest sound of a single glass being dropped on the floor: pretty much every person understands that the process of childbirth is not typically a quiet one. As the due date approaches, the tension builds, the drama continues among family members, another disastrous mistake occurs, and things hit a fever pitch as the climax unfolds.
A Quiet Place is one of those movies that manages its time really well. It's almost two-hours long, but the time flies pretty quickly. The pace is probably the strongest positive of the movie because, even though there is a sense of tension building at all times due to the imminent danger of the world, it never feels like we're lingering too much on one scene before the next significant moment. The fact that the premise restricts the ability of its characters to verbally communicate seems to have been a good restriction. It's forced more creativity out of its filmmakers when it comes to conveying the scenes using physical details and not wasting too much time on exposition. That being said, the film still uses plenty of tropes, clichés, and jump scares to get its point across. Some of these tropes work to a degree, while others are very distracting, especially when you consider how the storytelling relies on these physical details so much more than a typical movie.
There's a good tense scene in the middle of the movie that is mostly ruined by a jump scare involving a small animal that cannot fly. I am willing to accept that birds, or even small and agile rodents continue to exist in a world where super-fast and powerful blind monsters exist to kill everything that makes a sound. But anything bigger and slower than a rabbit without the intelligence of a person who understands the rules of this world should not be alive after 300+ days if all of society has collapsed within a year of these creatures showing up.
In addition to somewhat thoughtless moments like this, as well as a very convenient way of resolving the threat at the end of the movie that apparently was never tried by anyone else when the monsters first showed up, I have a small pet-peeve in the form of a very obnoxious whiteboard that is shown throughout the film. It's one of those details that is the equivalent of physical exposition because everything that is written on it is so unnecessary and would never have been written by a person living in that world. All the text on it is made pretty obvious by what occurs in the movie, not to mention all the cliché newspaper clippings that are scattered around the room that surround the whiteboard tell you that "It's sound!" We know it's sound, they know it's sound, so why do you have the newspapers up along with your dumb whiteboard which tells us nothing new? It's an extremely unnecessary detail, like a few others in the movie, that gets far more attention than it needs.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
A Quiet Place is an exciting, tense, and fun movie that moves briskly and is over before you know it. It has some scenes and details that detract from the premise and the experience due to their somewhat amateurish methods of atmospheric storytelling. It's also not that surprising of a movie. However, if you can suspend your disbelief enough, the characters, the drama, and the tension make the movie worth the watch, regardless of how "original" it is.
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