A Quiet Place: Mindful, Soulful Horror

My grandparents recently gave my family a clock that had sat on their mantle for as long as I can remember, a clock that tick-tick-ticks methodically with the passage of time. Such is the irony of life, as the first movie I chose to pick up while back home for the summer was one I'd seen many times before, John Krasinski's surprise 2018 horror hit A Quiet Place, an excellent movie that a quiet ticking can somehow enhance. Mind you, there's a reason this movie outperformed expectations by leaps and bounds. A Quiet Place is a simply marvelous movie that swings effortlessly between heart-stopping suspense and thoughtful meditation on grief. For the five of you unfamiliar with it, the premise is simple - the small-town Abbott family must survive and prepare for the birth of a child amongst a world of mysterious and dangerous monsters with super-sensitive hearing, while at the same time dealing with a tragedy that changed their family forever.

Every last little detail of this movie pays homage to its unique premise. Every little sound brings the possibility of sudden death, a fact A Quiet Place makes abundantly clear in no uncertain terms. The rules of its world are simple, yet so easy to mistakenly break with the smallest of an oversight, and this movie can be a real nail-biter simply because its human characters are so limited. By necessity, the visual storytelling of A Quiet Place is excellent. They say a picture paints a thousand words, and A Quiet Place paints at 24 frames per second. We understand who the Abbotts are and how they operate in this silent world with zero expositional dialogue, a remarkable achievement.

For a movie with quiet in its name, one of the most impressive things about it is its sound design, especially when it comes to the stretches of silence seen through the eyes but not heard through the ears of Millicent Simmonds's Regan, a character just as deaf as the actress portraying her. Marco Beltrami's understated score works wonderfully with this movie's limited soundscape, pushing the boundaries of what a movie can do with sound design. The acting in this movie is simply delightful on all levels. The cast has no weak link, and every empathetic interaction, intimate moment, and terrifying encounter in A Quiet Place is played with the utmost seriousness and sincerity. Its heart is big, and I'd go so far as to say that it's a movie defined not by its horror or even by its portrayal of survival, but rather by love. It's painfully and tenderly intimate, enticing you with its unique premise of monsters with ultra-sensitive hearing before revealing itself to be much, much more.

Nevertheless, I can assure you that A Quiet Place doesn't skimp on the terror. The craft and filmmaking highlight of this movie is most definitely the scene where Evelyn, the mom, gives birth. It's an unbelievably intense and absurdly well-plotted scene, a centerpiece that one-ups every other moment of suspense and terror before it. The monsters in this movie are also some of the smartest and most terrifying cinematic creations of a twisted mind I've seen in my time. We only catch brief glimpses of them until the last third of the film, making them a threat rarely seen but always felt, one that makes good on itself every so often.

A Quiet Place is a short movie with the mannerisms of a longer, far more complex drama. Its thoughtful meditation on regret and self-condemnation is surprisingly touching, rivaled only by a less-is-more approach to horror whose largely unseen monster is a marvel of cinema, an innovative and vile creation that feels unstoppable without ever appearing unfeasible. The film's simplicity is both charming and effective, and though it may prevent the movie from breaking something of an artificial ceiling every so often, neither does A Quiet Place ever go off the rails. It's a simple story about navigating complex family dynamics, a simple story told exceptionally well. It's got a mind and even a soul, rare commodities in a horror movie. Sure, it's simple. But oftentimes, less is more. Sometimes way more.

A Quiet Place - 9/10

Proverbs 23:22-25