Horror — and More

In the opening minutes of A Quiet Place, a small group of people tiptoes silently through an apparently abandoned grocery store, loading supplies into a backpack. Are they stealing? Hiding? Both? A small figure darts down a shadowy aisle, running so fast that we can’t see who, or even what, it is. Is it after them? With them? A woman reaches for a prescription bottle with the intense concentration of a person playing pick-up-sticks; her fingers tremble as she lifts the bottle without touching the bottles around it. Perhaps these are druggies looking for a fix? No — a young boy lies on the ground beside the woman, bundled in a blanket and leaning lethargically against the wall. This is a family, we realize, utterly silent, and utterly afraid. Within minutes we understand why: an alien species is terrorizing the neighborhood, and it hunts by sound rather than sight or smell. The people must remain silent in order to survive.

A Quiet Place is the best kind of horror film, relying on tension, foreshadowing, and misdirection rather than blood and gore to create panic in the audience. The family members communicate through sign language, walk barefoot, identify creaky floorboards with paint, cover hard surfaces with cloth to muffle their noise, and widen their eyes in terror with every misplaced movement that might elicit a sound. Shadowy lighting, a suspenseful musical score by Michael Beltrami, sudden noises, incomplete information, and brief sightings of the monsters are enough to make us curl our toes and grab the hand beside us.

But this is more than a horror movie. It’s a movie about how to exist as a family when everything around you has turned upside down, when silence is essential to survival, and when each family member has the potential to put all the others at risk through something as simple as a sneeze, a cough, or a slip of the fingers. A newspaper headline about the invasion warns inhabitants, “They Can Hear You.” Another advises, “Stay Silent, Stay Alive.” I couldn’t help but compare these monsters that hunt their victims through sounds made in the privacy of their own homes to an Orwellian government that spies on its citizens, devours them, and turns children against their parents.

How do you create a sense of normalcy for your children in the face of such unrelenting surveillance? Mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) provides schooling for her children, even though they can’t speak out loud. Children Regan (Millicent Simonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe), and Beau (Cade Woodward) learn self-reliance and accountability as they work, play, and tussle together. Father Lee (John Krasinski) feels a particular burden to provide for his family, protect them from this danger, and teach them how to survive it. He’s a true libertarian hero, relying on wit, courage, and innovation to take care of his own. There are many tender acts of love in this film that raise it above the level of a merely scary movie, as well as poignant moments of misunderstanding that need to be resolved, before the thrilling climax.

When Krasinski was offered the role of the father, he liked it so much that he revised the script by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, signed on as director, hired his wife Emily Blunt to play the mother, and insisted on hiring deaf actress Millicent Simmonds (who was so good in last year’s Wonderstruck) to play the deaf daughter. He ended up with an executive producer credit as well. The result is one of those perfect labors of love that unite terrific storytelling with terrific character development and a terrific ending that keeps you thinking about it long after the credits roll. I will probably see this one a second time.