A Quiet Place is an exciting and inventive experimentation in silence and self-sabotage
MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
The hook of A Quiet Place — a family has to remain silent from monstrous hunters that have taken over and hunted down humanity — is the film equivalent of building a wall with one arm tied behind your back, the other holding bricks and mortar, and a frantic itch sequestered on the tip of your nose. It’s the kind of high concept hook that would have prospective investors, distributors, audiences and social media denizens salivating over. One of those ‘how has no one thought of this yet?!?’ deals that makes you question if you’ve got any imaginative ability.
But… it’s also got a whiff of being too high concept for its own good.
John Krasinski, who pulls triple duty as director, writer (with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) and cco-lead, intentionally paints himself into a corner with the film’s premise, reminiscent of so many Breaking Bad episodes. It’s a delicate and dangerous balancing act, any misstep would spell laughable disaster for it. The conceit that these hunters — in sparse references throughout the film, they seem to be extraterrestrial in nature — have been hunting down us hapless, clumsy humans by way of sound detection throws up a bag of pretzels when it comes to internal logic and believability. If you were so inclined to wander down that weed infested path. It requires a disciplined, obsessive adherence to the premise. Become too lazy with what can and can’t be done, and the film loses any sense of narrative purpose or emotional thrust.
Much like the constance vigilance the family has to maintain to keep themselves alive, so too does the film require that same level of awareness to keep things from falling apart. What’s more, the story deals in a serious manner with family, loss and the desire for communication that wouldn’t be out of place in a Ken Loach film. By taking advantage of the premise as if it was a puzzle box that can only be solved through whatever inventive cinematic technique is at their disposable, the filmmakers succeed in creating an exhilarating, heart racing movie that revels in sustained tension and a ‘how are they going to get out this jam?’ fascination. Krasinski manages to get enough juice from the premise to sustain the entire film.
When it opens with the family, led by Krasinski and Emily Blunt —who puts a stirring performance and is the clear MVP of the movie — at a chemist looking for medicine for one of their children the rules when out in the open are laid out: bare feet, sign language, walking on sand, any potential sound from objects are not allowed (with deadly consequences), cautious, careful movements — like you’re grabbing a delicate flower among a web of thorns. Despite all these efforts, tragedy strikes and we witness the very real stakes of what this family — and by extension the rest of humanity that still survives — are up against. The film jumps ahead almost a year, the family live a monastic, agrarian life on a farm and they’re awaiting the birth of a child, which of course presents a whole new raft of problems that they’ve once more prepared for.
From here on out, the movie revolves around a two day stretch, throwing up problems for both the characters and the filmmakers to solve. Red lights are used for when the house is under threat, hunting fish in a rushing river that masks the sound, the uncontrollable nature of other humans, or a bit of lint getting caught and exposing a nail that becomes the most squirmish inducing Chekhov’s gun in recent memory. All these obstacles and more continue to pile up, in a way that risks turning the whole thing into a joke, but Krasinski and the writers manage to keep the ship not just afloat but with a wet sail. With all the explosives threads in place, the film pulls the trigger in a second half that is a non-stop thrill ride, always teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, injecting a few jump scares that are more effective than they should be, inventive set piece after inventive set piece and a compelling, surprising emotional payoff by the beginning of the third act.
A Quiet Place is a fantastic example of how far good filmmaking and committed performances can take a possibly swiss cheese of an idea, even if it sounds like a slam dunk on paper. (Special mention also to having Millicent Simmonds, an actress who is deaf, as the daughter. It provides that extra layer of believability and emotional authenticity, while her father’s attempts at fixing her hearing aid becomes a dynamite of a plot thread in the second half)
This is very much a gloriously delicious B-movie with all the panache and inventiveness that comes from storytellers taking a risk on something that could have been profoundly stupid. We don’t get much in the way of information as to why these monsters have made earth their own personal game pen. The less you think about such things the better.
It manages to stick the landing in the finale that opens up and closes the loop of the story. But not only that, it backs it up with a compelling tale of togetherness and resistance, of still having a voice in a world that seeks to destroy any semblance of that. The hunters are merely representations of the forces that seek to silence those who dare to speak out. In that it becomes a somewhat prescient film for the current political climate. The fact that a film like this — well made, insightful, effective, with little to no fat weighing it down and believable characters was produced through Michael Bay’s production company makes the critical, commercial and audience success of the film even more baffling.
A Quiet Place is currently out everywhere.
