John Krasinski’s career has been plagued by his most famous role—Jim, from the office. The show has been over for years now (but it’s not like we aren’t rewatching it), and trying to shed his connotation of a dorky, lovable salesmen at Dunder Mifflin paper company, Krasinski has shed his comedic acting history, doing a 180 (similar to Jordon Peele), becoming a horror movie director. A Quiet Place not only stars, but is directed and written by Krasinski, with his wife Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, and Noah Jupe.
A Quite Place drops the audience right into a post apocalyptic world, devastated by aliens that have killed most of the world’s population, hunting them by sound. The creatures are blind, but can incredible hearing, so the surviving families live in complete silence. This film is excellent in showing how these families survive, putting sand down in paths, not wearing shoes, eating with their hands on leaves instead of using silverware.
The film moves to a little after a year since the start of the event that caused these aliens to come to earth, following a nameless family of a mother and father and their two children. The acting in this film is impeccable, with most of the film lacking dialogue, the cast must emote everything with body language and facial expression. You can feel the desperation, suffering, the pain in their faces. The mother is pregnant, and the family is preparing for the birth of the child. When tragedy hit the family in the worse moment, we see how they react, survive, and the sacrifices the parents must make for their children.
A Quite Place does many things well, but my favor things occurs when we go to the perspective of the daughter, who is deaf, and all the sound is sucked out of the film. While this is a quiet movie, the complete lack of sound shows you how truly loud our world is, and what it is like for this girl to live in this world. Secondly, the film uses the perspective of the children to show the rules of this world. There is a scene next to a water fall, and the father shows his kid that they can be as loud as they want next to sounds that are louder, that drown your sound out. This is used throughout the film multiple times to trick the creatures.
A Quite Place is one of the most creative horror films I’ve seen in a long time. With great characters, a suspenseful plot, and an appropriate amount of jump scares, Krasinski really shows his film making chops. I give A Quite Place an 8/10, and would highly recommend it to any horror fan, or someone just looking for a good scare.
