A Quiet Place (2018)

Official trailer

John Krasinski plays Lee Abbott and Emily Blunt plays Evelyn Abbott, with Millicent Simmonds as Regan Abbott and Noah Jupe as Marcus Abbott. Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, and John Krasinski wrote the screenplay. Paramount Pictures distributed the film for theatrical release in April 2018 to major commercial and critical success. A Quiet Place was John Krasinski’s third feature as director and his first major commercial production after his earlier independent comedy films.

Few horror films make me hold my breath without noticing, and this one does it over and over. Krasinski takes one simple rule and squeezes every drop of dread out of it. It’s an 8 for me because the rules start to wobble when I think about them for long, and the ending ties itself up a bit too neatly.

A Quiet Place is a major commercial success in contemporary horror and a considerable entry in the post-apocalyptic horror tradition. Krasinski’s commitment to near-silent filmmaking, with dialogue largely replaced by American Sign Language and physical communication across the running time, produced a viewing experience that 2018 audiences hadn’t previously encountered at real commercial scale. The film’s specific commitment to silence as both narrative premise and as production choice has considerably influenced later horror filmmaking, with later productions adapting elements of the sound-hunting threat conceit.

The Silent-Filmmaking Approach

Krasinski’s direction works through considerable silent-filmmaking techniques that contemporary commercial horror productions rarely deploy. American Sign Language largely replaces dialogue across the running time, with the family communicating through gesture and facial expression instead of through speech. The approach gives the film a particular atmosphere that conventional sound-design horror can’t achieve.

The near-silence in most sequences pulls the audience in, and people become aware of their own sounds. Anyone chewing popcorn suddenly feels loud. That effect is what I admire most about the film. Krasinski turns a room full of strangers into accomplices in the family’s silence, and conventional horror can’t touch that.

Millicent Simmonds as Regan

Millicent Simmonds is deaf and uses American Sign Language as her primary communication. Her casting as the deaf older daughter Regan provided realism that hearing-actor casting couldn’t have supplied. The character’s deafness is fundamental to the film’s actual plot, with Regan’s cochlear implant providing the weakness that allows the family to combat the monsters in the closing act.

Simmonds’s performance, with so much of it carried in sign language, gives the film a realism hearing actors couldn’t have provided.

The casting was a real production commitment that Krasinski and his team prioritized in a commercial horror film, and the performance has been widely praised since. I think she’s the best thing in the movie. She says more with her face and hands than most horror leads manage with a page of dialogue.

The Pregnancy Plot

Evelyn Abbott’s pregnancy across the running time produces sustained narrative tension that conventional post-apocalyptic horror productions rarely match. The pregnancy is established in the early sequences and develops across the running time, with the labor sequence in the middle act producing a standout horror set-piece in contemporary cinema. The character must give birth while remaining silent enough to avoid attracting the sound-hunting monsters.

The pregnancy is both a serious dramatic element and a direct horror premise, and that combination sets A Quiet Place apart from horror films that treat pregnancy as background detail or as its own subgenre. The labor sequence is the scene that makes me rate it this high. A woman trying to give birth without making a sound is about as cruel a setup as horror has come up with, and Blunt sells every second of it.

Is A Quiet Place worth watching?

A Quiet Place is a lean, nasty, clever horror film, and I’d put it on again without hesitation. Krasinski’s commitment to silence, Simmonds’s performance and the labor sequence take it a long way. What keeps it from a 9 is that the monsters’ rules get fuzzy the moment I start poking at them, and the cochlear implant solution in the closing act arrives a little too conveniently for a film this careful everywhere else.

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