Geek Review: A Quiet Place

Watson covered this one, and he told the rest of us that this so far is the best movie he’s seen in 2018.

Well, I am not Watson, and people are glad for that fact.  What did I think?

This was a damn solid film from start to finish.  Jumping almost three months into a crisis where very sound-sensitive monsters have killed most of the human race, and then bouncing another year into the future, the film follows a family just trying to stay alive..  Any sound above the smallest whisper can bring death, bringing a sure challenge to any human survivor.  And sure enough, the “rules” are spelled out rather easily with little dialogue, and what little dialogue the film has is done with sign language and subtitles.  This is a movie that pays a lot of attention to small moments because, in order to survive, you’d have to.  I get the impression that I’d be dead from farting my sleep, personally, but the small details that went into keeping things quiet worked very well in this film.  The audience and the characters know the creatures, whatever they are or wherever they came from is never really revealed, but there are so many small details that the main characters have adopted just to stay alive ranging from the obvious (surveillance cameras) to the subtle (lettuce leafs instead of plates for dinner to avoid clanking).  Factor in the way the film uses ambient sound, and you have a movie that makes sound itself a real presence and factor in ways most movies don’t and in a way that is vital for the story this movie is trying to tell.

Directed by, starring, and co-written by John Krasinski, there isn’t anything out of place here.  The acting, from Krasinski, his wife onscreen and off Emily Blunt, and the various child actors playing their children–particularly deaf actress Millicent Simmonds as their deaf daughter–is great, and Krasinski just took the stage as a promising director with a knock-out premier.  I don’t like most horror movies, but smart horror like this one should be encouraged.  Heck, the last couple horror movies I did go to were great works of cinema.  Maybe we’re seeing a Horror Renaissance.  In the meantime, let’s give this one a perfect ten out of ten survivors blaming themselves for the lose of someone close to them.