Shudder Sunday: A Quiet Place

Director: John Krasinski

Year: 2018

Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Suspense

Summary: A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.

4/5 Pineapples

Review:

With a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, critics are calling A Quiet Place the "scariest movie in years." And, honestly, I agree.

This is a different kind of horror. A Quiet Place plays on a new kind of fear by stripping us of our only way of quickly communicating in times of distress: our voices and making sound. By taking away our basic form of communicating, warning each other, and crying out for help, we as viewers are left in a state of constant anticipation and tension while we watch our main characters fight for their lives in complete silence.

Music is usually a big contributor to the creepiness of films. It's said that if you watch a horror movie without sound, it will no longer be as terrifying. This film flips that theory on it's head by proving a decent story line and mysterious creatures with extremely sensitive hearing are all you need to keep viewers increasingly uncomfortable and on edge. If you couldn't gather from the trailers and the title of the film itself, A Quiet Place has very little sound or music, and was still able to keep me on the edge of my seat. By keeping a majority of the film quiet, the noises you do hear are extremely startling and intense. This aspect of the film pulled me into the story and had me feeling like I also had to be extra quiet with our main characters while I was watching, as if I too was being hunted.

Now for the details. SPOILERS AHEAD.

A Quiet Place follows a family 80+ days after aliens have attacked and over-run earth.

In case anyone was also like me and was a bit misled by the trailers to believe that the question propelling this story was going to be, "what's hunting them?!", we were wrong. We discover that it's aliens within the first 5 - 10 minutes. The film cruises by in a swift hour and a half with a different question sitting in the back of our minds. But I'll get to that.

The family - consisting of Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Lee (John Krasinski, who also directed the film), Regan who is deaf (and played by an actually deaf actress, Millicent Simmonds), Marcus, and Beau - is gathering supplies in an abandoned and dilapidated town for their sick, middle-son, Marcus. While out gathering supplies, Beau, the youngest son, spots a toy rocket ship. Lee, his father, tells him through sign language that the toy is too loud to keep. Lee removes the batteries and sets the toy aside before turning to head back home. Regan, who feels bad for Beau and wants him to experience some kind of a childhood, allows him to take the rocket, not realizing Beau pocketed the batteries as well. On their way home, Beau, pulls out his rocket ship, puts the batteries back in place, and the toy fires up with shockingly loud beeps and soaring sounds. Lee spins around from walking ahead of his family and sprints to Beau as fast as he can, but a giant alien creature with huge limbs, claw-like hands, and no face - aside from a large, toothy, menacing smile - makes it to Beau first. The family silently gasps in horror.

Roughly a year later, the family has managed life in silence, and is living inside a cabin in the middle of the woods on a farm.

If you're looking for back story. There is none. We don't know if this was their farm at the start of the alien attack, or if it was abandoned post-attack and they took it as their own and then had to learn the necessary skills to manage a farm and live in a post-apocalypse universe. But they're managing pretty well by fishing, growing food, using leaves as silent plates, marking the floor boards to avoid stepping on the ones that creek, using sign language to communicate, using Morse code to attempt to contact other countries, rigging lights and fireworks in case of emergency....etc. We also don't know why the aliens attacked or what it was like when they arrived. All we know is this family needs to be quiet in order to survive.

Oh yeah, and Evelyn is pregnant.

So the question propelling this story is actually, "how are they going to keep a baby quiet? and, how is she going to give a silent birth?"

As the story goes on, it's gathered that Regan and Lee don't see eye to eye, and haven't seen eye to eye since Beau became an alien's snack. She blames herself and believes he blames her. And it doesn't help that Lee takes Marcus out on fishing trips but insists that Regan stay behind with her mother.

Meanwhile, Lee has a secret workshop where he's struggling to find these creatures' weakness while simultaneously building Regan a hearing-aid that actually works. This basement has multiple televisions set up so they can see anything happening on the security cameras that they have around their property, newspapers thrown about, and a workbench with lots of audio equipment. For whatever reason, Regan is not allowed into her father's workshop. There's an argument when he offers her a new hearing-aid because she's tired of the consistent disappointment when they don't work, but she unwillingly takes it and holds on to it.

As mentioned above, Lee ends up taking Marcus on a trip to gather fish from traps that they had set and insists Regan stay with her mother. She gets upset, cries in her room, and as a last resort - attempts to use the hearing-aid. It's another failed piece of machinery, and she angrily begins packing her things. She decides to hike back to the site where they lost her brother, Beau, in an attempt at finding solace - ultimately leaving her pregnant mother alone.

Her mother, Evelyn is doing laundry (silently by hand, of course) and begins carrying the clothes up the stairs when the cloth bag she's carrying the clothes in gets snagged on a nail in the stairs. Her tugging on the bag pulls the nail up so it's sticking directly up through the step, waiting to impale anyone coming down the stairs. Shortly after, of course, the baby decides to come a few weeks early while the kids and Lee are away.

Evelyn does her best to maneuver and keep quiet through contractions and makes her way back down the stairs to signal a silent alarm (a string of bright red lights around the house). On her way down the steps, she steps on the uprooted nail. She stifles a scream, but accidentally drops something fragile that she was carrying. (I believe it was some form of baby Beau memorabilia, but I've seen the film once, and I'm not positive. Truly, it's not important what it was.) The sound of the crash lures one of the creatures into her home, and she struggles to quietly escape back up the stairs and out the door. She makes it up the stairs by distracting the alien with the sound of a timer, but when she attempts to run outside, there are more creatures being drawn in by said timer. She hides upstairs in the bathroom tub and muffles the sounds of her giving birth the best that she can with a blanket.

Lee and Marcus are on their way back from gathering their fish when they encounter a man in the woods. He's standing over a woman of roughly the same age that's been murdered - by the aliens, I assume. The man is devastated, and despite Lee's efforts to quiet him, the man let's out a scream. Lee picks up Marcus and hides a few yards away behind a tree, before an alien quickly comes through the brush and swallows up the old man.

They adjust from the shock, and Lee and Marcus continue home. They soon notice the red lights and creatures circling the house. Lee tells Marcus what to do, and Marcus runs to set off fireworks to distract the creatures and lure them away from the house. The fireworks go off just in time for Evelyn to cry out in pain.

The creatures disperse, and Lee runs into the house searching for Evelyn. He fears that she's dead when he finds their bath tub full of blood, but it turns out she's just in the shower now for some reason.

Not sure how she had the baby and got inside the shower that fast. But I digress.

Regan sees the fireworks light up the night sky and begins running towards home.

Lee carries Evelyn and the baby into a cellar where the door is simply a mattress.

1.) There are a lot of cabin cellars involved in the story, and I found myself unsure of which one we were in most of the time.

2.) I get that the mattress is supposed to muffle sound, but I found myself worrying that an alien was going to walk over it and simply fall in.

Anyway, with aliens in toe, Lee, their newborn, and Evelyn make it into the cellar, hook the baby - that's beginning to cry - up to oxygen, and put him inside a home-made, sound-proof wooden box.

I don't know about anyone else but putting a newborn in a box really triggered me. This film tugs on your heart strings in a few unsettling ways. Dead little boy, newborn in a box, deaf daughter who can't get a working hearing-aid, aliens attacking earth... Yikes.

Evelyn is set down on a cot to rest, and Lee goes searching for Regan and Marcus, unaware that a broken pipe is leaking water and flooding the cellar where his wife and newborn lie.

Regan is now back at the farm, in the corn field, and unaware that an alien is directly behind her. (I would have thought that someone that is deaf would have a better sense of vibrations. Especially with a fairly large beast behind them.) The creatures sensitive hearing picks up a painful feedback in Regan's hearing-aid and flees the scene.

Regan ends up finding Marcus under a truck, hiding from the aliens. They decide to go to the top of their silo and light a fire to attract attention from their father or anyone that might be able to help, but they're low on lighter fluid and the fire quickly goes out. They fight over whether to wait or go searching for their parents before Marcus falls through a rusted door on the top of the silo and begins to sink in the deep pile of corn inside. The rusted door falls in behind him, and Regan jumps in after it.

Meanwhile, Evelyn wakes up in the cot, with a cellar full of waist-high water. She goes to swiftly get out of bed to retrieve her baby that's about to drown in a box flooding with water, when she realizes the top to the box is missing and there's an alien in the room with her. An alien that can apparently swim. She maneuvers slowly through the water, and is able to retrieve her (not dead) baby from the box. The sound of the door falling into the silo in the distance startles the creature and lures it outside of the cellar.

Inside the silo, the feedback in Regan's hearing aid deters the monster again. Lee and the kids are reunited when he hears them in the silo, and they struggle to get back to the cellar with their mother who has made her way back to their home basement. Evelyn searches for her family on the television screens and spots them as they come in contact with an alien creature. Marcus and Regan get inside a truck for cover and Lee grabs an ax to protect himself. The creature begins attacking the truck, and Lee sees no solution where all of them make it out alive. He makes eye contact with Regan and signs, "I love you. I always love you," before letting out a scream to draw the monster toward him and away from his children in the truck.

Evelyn watches her husband sacrifice himself.

The kids make it back to their house and reunite with their mother in the basement who has since found a shotgun. Marcus cowers in a corner and holds his newborn baby brother in his arms, while Regan and her mother struggle to find a defense against the aliens swarming their house. A creature is drawn down the stairs by something (I can't remember by what - maybe the baby crying? The script isn't available yet, sorry!) and approaches Evelyn and Regan, baring its teeth. Regan cranks the volume knob on her fathers microphone and puts her hearing-aid up to it, creating a literal head-splitting screech. The monster crumples to the ground, disoriented, and the mother and daughter share a moment of victory, before the alien rises back up, angrier than ever. Evelyn cocks the shotgun and blows off the head of the assailant.

In the security camera footage, we can see swarms of aliens sprinting toward the sound of the shotgun. The mother and daughter share another look, before Evelyn cocks the shotgun and the film cuts to black before running credits.

~

So here's how I feel:

Definitely go see this film. It's produced well, it's clear John Krasinski put a lot of heart behind it, the story is unique and intense, and the use of sound - and lack there of - is truly a one of a kind horror experience.

For starters, John Krasinski insisted that a deaf actress be cast in this film. Representation of the deaf community, or anyone with a disability, in Hollywood is grossly unheard of. Usually, an able-bodied actor or actress is cast in the role of a character that is deaf or has a disability. Hardly ever do we see an actor with a disability playing a character with said disability.

That aspect, as well as the fact that Emily Blunt and John Krasinski - who are married in real life and share two daughters together - call this film a "love letter" to their children, makes this film all the more personal, important, and worth watching.

In regards to the story and the screenplay, there were a few moments I wanted to appreciate. The scene of Marcus and Lee walking through the woods and stumbling into an old man, I believe may have been a foreshadowing of the sacrifice that Lee was going to make for his children when they're in the truck and being attacked by an alien. Also, the film incorporates many dilapidated cabins and cellars, which as I mentioned earlier was a bit hard to keep up with for me, but a friend of mine has a theory that the old house with the basement that Lee had his work shop in was the house they lived in while Beau was still alive. After Beau's passing, they couldn't bear the emotional burden of his memory within the home, so they focused most of their daily activities in the cabin which is where they also built the nursery in the cellar. These are just a couple theories that I'm curious to see if anyone else picked up on and agrees or disagrees with.

All of that being said, I do have a few minor bones to pick.

Throughout the film, when we're met with the creatures, they're making clicking sounds. This gave me the impression that the creatures sensed their surroundings by using their extremely sensitive hearing and echolocation; the location of objects by reflected sound, used by animals such as dolphins and bats. But if that were the case, when our main characters are face to face with the aliens - as they often are - the creatures would be able to locate them based on the reverberation of the clicking sounds they're making off of the surrounding objects and off of our characters. I've presented this theory to a few friends, and they disagree. But, what else could the clicking have been for?

Lastly, I wanted full-belly, blood curdling screams. We're in a world where our characters have been living in silence for a little over a year. If you're going to risk endangering yourself to scream out of terror or a cry for help, I'd expect it to be spine-tingling. Instead, I got "screams" equivalent to those that you may experience on a roller coaster. More like, drawn out yells.

4/5 Pineapples because the movie was pretty great up until Evelyn cocks the shotgun and the film cuts to black. Had they cut the scene without cocking the shotgun, it would have felt a lot less Hollywood and a little more genuine. That being said, I love the mystery we're left with.

What do you think? Did they survive?

And, as always,