an A QUIET PLACE musing

Considering that A QUIET PLACE basically trains you to embrace the silence for the rest of the quick 90 minute duration, director John Krasinski does a great job of keeping that tension throughout. There’s nothing particularly flashy about the filmmaking, other than its willingness to use silence as its own character. But overall, A QUIET PLACE succeeds at being a fun play on the horror genre that doesn’t quite come together in the end.

When some sort of apocalyptic happening brings about monsters who kill anything that makes a sound, a family, with parents played by real-life husband and wife John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, tries to survive on their farm. They care for their son, who the father is training to be independent in this world, as well as their deaf daughter, who feels responsible for an event early on in the film. Much of the emotional resonance of the movie comes from the relationships of each of the pairings within the family. The parents are overprotective for good reason, and have only survived because of their resourcefulness.

Blunt turns in an enormously powerful performance, mainly because of her scenes playing that horror when the monsters come too close for comfort. The script skillfully puts the characters, especially the mother, in stressful situations and lets the actors play around that. Krasinski proves himself to be a dependable dramatic actor, and a skillful director. He puts in slight commentaries on nuclear families, and asks if families in a society like this would default to the man to lead.

The ending of A QUIET PLACE didn’t tonally match up to the rest of the film for me, although it did leave me feeling a way I wouldn’t have thought as the lights in the theater dimmed. But it’s a very well crafted genre movie that forced me to cover my ears for pretty much all of an hour and a half. It’s an extremely effective movie that exhibits the actors’ and filmmakers’ prowess.

RATING: PURCHASING FOR MY COLLECTION

(Refer to my rating system HERE!)