"A Quiet Place"

 ☆☆☆½ 

So much of A Quiet Place is so right, so tense and tremendously well-crafted, that it's not until after the perfect last shot that you start thinking ... and wondering ... and scratching your head.

That's what happened with the audience that had moments ago been shrieking with glee; on the way out, you heard people wondering, "But ... ," and "If ... ," and "So ... ," and none of that harms the movie at all during its spare and taut running time, but drains it of some of its post-viewing potency.

Parts of A Quiet Place bear resemblance to other films and TV shows, especially the Alien movies and "Lost," but it takes a while for A Quiet Place to fall into the realm of familiarity.  It's the setup, which feels both fresh and expertly told, that really hooks us:

A family scrounges for supplies in a town that appears to have been ravaged during an apocalyptic event, and they're being very quiet about it.  Something is forcing their silence, something much more sinister and dire than the fact that the teenage daughter is deaf.  There's something desperate about the way the mother communicates with her kids through sign language, about the way the pre-teen son  keeps so quiet, and the father insists that his youngest child put down a toy, telling him, "It's too loud."

This long, unspeakably tense prologue ends in a tragedy that drives the most human of emotions that are on display throughout the rest of the film, and sets up a core conflict between two of the characters that offers some surprising emotional depth to the movie.

It's also visually a stunner, and that may be the biggest surprise of the film -- that its lead actor, John Krasinski, is also the director, and that he has a magnificent visual style and a bold storytelling ability.   Starring with his real-life wife Emily Blunt, along with tremendous supporting work by Millicent Simmonds as their deaf daughter and Noah Jupe as their skittish son, Krasinski makes the first part of the film work best.

There's almost no dialogue, the story reveals itself in inventive ways, and we come to realize that what's going on involves monsters from outer space.  It's almost a little bit of a letdown to discover that the movie is going to take its alien-invasion concept so literally; the setup is so spectacular that it's hard to imagine it having a fulfilling payoff.

But it does, mostly -- especially as the movie separates its main characters in order place them all in maximum peril.  And throughout, A Quiet Place dazzles by focusing on its novel conceit: That the aliens attack people based on sound, and that everyone, at all times, must be very, very, very quiet.

This works wonderfully, except, alas, when it doesn't, and perhaps its a testament to Krasinski as a director and a screenwriter (he wrote the script with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) that the enormous effort to close some of the plot holes doesn't feel as obvious as it is.  But the primary problem is that A Quiet Place can't close them all, and eventually logic wiggles its way into the back of your head while you watch the movie: Doesn't that make a noise?  How come the scary monsters can hear that and not that?  And why, for Pete's sake, would any reasonable husband and wife decide it's a good idea to bring a crying, screaming, noisy baby into a world that demands silence?

Though the movie runs only 90 minutes, for about 15 or 20 precious minutes those huge plot holes threaten to overwhelm the movie, and might succeed if everything didn't pivot to a numbingly tense scene in a grain silo that triggers a real whopper of an ending, all of it leading up to a final moment that has to rank as one of the most satisfying of any horror film.

A Quiet Place is a squealing, squirming, fist-clenching delight, as long as you keep reminding your brain -- which may start nagging you about some of the things you're seeing -- of the only rule in the film that matters: "Just shut up."




Viewed April 6, 2018 -- Arclight Sherman Oaks

2015