Review: A Quiet Place, A Near Perfect Film
- Apr 5, 2018
- 2 min read
Silence is indeed golden.
Lee and Evelyn Abbott (John Krasinski and Emily Blunt), along with there children, must survive in a world in dominated by monsters that hunt by sound alone. The smallest noise, talking, walking, anything, spells death.
From excellent visual storytelling and well written characters to intensely thrilling horror and a nail biting finale, A Quiet Place stands out as something that is both different and familiar, and a movie with almost no faults. John Krasinski, who is both lead and director, does an excellent job in both regards. The atmosphere is as palpable as the tension and, while it's light on plot, the storytelling is spot on. The audience is thrown into events some 80 odd days after the beginning of some kind of apocalypse. What happened before the film begins is never directly addressed, though through newspaper headlines and magazine covers, the events can be surmised. Emily Blunt is also excellent, though she doesn't have a lot to do. Even the child actors, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds and Cade Woodward, do a solid job. There's a few scenes that take a step back from the horror of it all, standouts that I won't soon forget.
It's not all positive however, and the one problem is painfully noticeable. For a film that's so totally focused on sound, or the lack thereof, it features a decent, if somewhat derivative soundtrack that accompanies many of the key scenes. In any other film it wouldn't be a problem, but here it takes away from much of the tension, bringing in an annoying reliance on jump scare sounds followed by ominous bass. When every sound should make the audience flinch, and indeed they do, this score undercuts a lot of the impact that they could have. Perhaps a music-less copy will be released, which would be ideal, but until then, the film falls ever so slightly short of its near perfect potential.
There are few films that effectively create the feelings of dread in the same way that A Quiet Place does. Perhaps Alien and The Thing come close, though they do it in different ways. Aside from and ending that's a little cheesy, and the aforementioned soundtrack issues, there's no reason not to see A Quiet Place. It's an excellent film that has earned its place amongst the annals of horror history.
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