‘A Quiet Place’ Will Make Even Your Heart Want to Escape the Theater In Overwhelming Fear
Paramount needs a win. Not necessarily a financial one — though it wouldn’t hurt — but rather a public relations one. The Cloverfield Paradox’s botched gambit of a release, Annihilation being kept out of theaters and dumped onto Netflix internationally and the mere existence of Sherlock Gnomes have all dealt heavy blows to their good will, as if the outrage by some at mother! wasn’t enough to endure. So where does a film studio next turn to lift them out of the mire, including the 11th spot in the studio market share hierarchy? At this point, why not a creature feature that takes around 35 minutes to feature a single line of spoken dialogue — about 23 minutes if you count barely audible whispering, however, though it may as well take its place amidst the other ambient soundscapes present?
Ironically enough, A Quiet Place roared its way into public consciousness back in mid-November with a trailer that screamed both mystery and intensity. Like the final cut’s opening half and hour (and change), it too features no spoken dialogue, and only a family of four’s mindful movements and signing. When a crashing lantern cracks through the brimming silence, we immediately understand sound’s significance in this world before needing a tagline.
Sound means death, silence is survival, meaning many a horror and film geek potentially found their next favorite genre flick for that very reason. Barrages of intertwined jump scares and loud noises have long held mainstream horror hostage to disguise a deficiency in the filmmakers’ technical skill and imagination, while basic principles of creating an effective atmosphere — the proper use of silence being the key — fall victim to their paralyzing clutch. Whatever noisy bits exist in A Quiet Place, they are few in number, healthily spaced throughout the narrative, though naturally more concentrated toward the final act, and as a result effective because of the suffocating aural nothingness that preceded them.
Though for many the film’s predilections for said nothingness might be a vague point of interest more than it would a selling point or gimmick, A Quiet Place is skillful enough in its storytelling and the execution of its sound design to quickly absorb any doubter’s attentions. Segments of heartwarming and often soul-crushing family drama are the hook, and the set pieces pull us under, dragging us deeper and deeper into the film’s horrifying abyss until we think our hearts will burst from our chests, unceremoniously blasting the poor individuals sitting in front of us. Anxiety weaves through our systems with feral animosity, and we hope to god these horrifying creatures onscreen can’t hear the characters’, much less our thunderous heartbeats.
A Quiet Place feels like horror filmmaking in its rawest form; the epitome of what it means to show, not tell, and it is absolutely radical in both its conception and as a wide release feature. In no way should any film this sparse in dialogue be in the running for a first-place finish at the box office complete with an opening potentially as high as $40 million, much less greenlit by a major studio willing to give it 3,500+ screens. At least, such would be the operating logic of just about any moviegoer who’s grown weary of the clattering and clanking set-piece stuffed extravaganzas of the superhero, general action, horror and even, in some strange cases, studio comedy variety. But as any lover of cinema hopes for, what conventional wisdom would have told us — these filmmakers, in particular — was a pipe dream steadily grows into reality because of an acute understanding for what makes a genre tick.
The film is a simple one, never getting caught up in the tempting accessorizing that would unnecessarily convolute proceedings. In a not-so-distant post-apocalyptic future, mysterious, grotesque creatures of unknown origins stalk the Earth. Blind, they hunt with frighteningly exceptional aural abilities, meaning all who remain must be extra cautious about their actions and the potentially life-threatening consequences they may wreak. The story focuses on a family of four, including a deaf daughter, trying their best to avoid certain death living off the land.
As noted earlier, the monsters’ appearances are limited to the occasional, but necessary punctuation amidst a narrative preferring to treat us to family drama compelling enough to extract maximum emotional engagement, perhaps because of its own simplicity in addition to fully invested performances from its actors. Various relationships between characters are, like most other aspects of the film, limited to a bare-bones structure that may seem thin anywhere else, but here are substantial enough to not only carry us through a slow-burning hour and a half, but also make each sequence of creature feature savagery that much more stressful.
It’s as arresting as any genre movie can hope to be, and it means A Quiet Place intentionally forsakes a narrative format with perfunctory beats giving away its many surprises before they grace the screen. It constantly exudes an aura of ‘anything goes’ few horror flicks today communicate, and it doesn’t hurt that the combination of dread-inducing sequences and imaginative creature design generate extra palpitations. This is fear at its purest and most unrestrained.
And though the audio tracks are filled with a heavy dose of empty space, Marco Beltrami’s score works its way into the tension to build its own atmosphere, deftly switching from fleeting optimism to dejection to complete terror. Perhaps first-time feature director and star John Krasinski lets it arise more than it should, and sometimes at inopportune moments, threatening what he spends most of the time painstakingly creating, but it’s not enough to distract from the overwhelming anxiety engendered by his and our commitment to the characters, partially due to an emphasis on one idea: in this world, sound has become a luxury for these protagonists, and gradually, the audience feels the same.
Just about any issue that does arise, in fact, however little in number they may be, feels little more than a superficial grievance thanks to Kransinski’s surprising composure as a debutant. Maybe it’d have been nice to have seen even fewer glimpses of the creatures, though their onscreen exposure is already relatively limited, but their inventive look is enough to satisfy any viewer’s requisite levels of nightmare fuel. Perhaps the final third even slightly overindulges in scriptwriting conveniences and conventional final act madness to inject a quicker pace than the previous hour allowed, but the emotional payoff reserved for those who’ve patiently awaited this eventual chaos forgives the odd corner cut to meet the standards of necessary brevity.
In the end, any movie that can make one overlook the occasional flaw is worth our support, and why not save that support for a product so willing to force its audience to ingest something so ambitiously different? A Quiet Place is one of those few films we can unabashedly bill less as a film, and more an experience — and we don’t have to feel obnoxiously pretentious doing so. The evidence supporting this notion is plentiful enough to spare us the discomfort. Paramount may claim the win they’ve desperately needed — with a project they seemed to show genuine faith in, no less — but let’s not forget who the real victors are in this scenario.
When studios lend their unwavering trust in filmmakers to achieve a daring vision, it isn’t too often they fail to sufficiently validate the studio’s confidence. And when filmmakers are fully granted that sort of assurance, to succeed unperturbed in their way, audiences are supplied with a generally stronger product with greater passion behind it, meaning we win most unequivocally. Don’t you just love it when an industry, or at least one sect of it believes they can do better than the usual?
4.5/5
