A Quiet Place Movie Review
A Quiet Place takes lessons from Hitchcock in suspense and then shows us suspense like a master. I studied filmmaking in college, and I took a class on Alfred Hitchcock movies. Hitchcock movies are lessons in suspense.
Hitchcock was famous for telling the difference between suspense and surprise. His example would be with surprise there is a bomb under the table that the audience does not know about and then boom! The bomb goes off surprising the audience. Suspense is SEEING the bomb underneath the table, and waiting for it to go off, all while watching a family have dinner over the table. That’s suspense. Surprise happens quickly and then it’s over. Suspense waits, it lasts longer. It’s more satisfying.
John Krasinski of The Office fame understands this, it’s as if he studied and this is his final exam, and he passed with flying colors. Krasinski wrote, directed, and stars as,Lee Abbot, the lead in A Quiet Place. The movie is also nearly a silent movie. Writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck watched a lot of silent movies in college and they put what they learned into this movie. Telling a story without talking takes some skill. Sign-language and subtitles are used to get the dialog across. There are scenes later in the movie where the dialog is spoken, but you’ll see why that is later.
The movie begins with the simple statement: 89 Days. It is 2020, and a race of monsters, we assume extra-terrestrial but are rightfully never told, has cause an apocalypse. We first come upon the Abbott family as they are searching through an abandoned pharmacy look for supplies and medicine for their son. There is no explanation for the dystopia, other than left over newspapers with the words “It’s Sound!”
During the opening scene Kransinski quickly gets to the suspense that will play out for the rest of the movie. The first death in the movie is set-up from the get go. You know the death of the youngest son going to happen and you sit there going “No. No. No!” until it does, it’s not a surprise, it’s suspense. And yet it’s still heart-wrenching when it happens.
Adding to the suspense the oldest daughter, Regan Abbott is deaf and has concealer implant, the actress playing the Regan is Millicent Simmons who is deaf in real life, bring a reality to the role that an actor with hearing could not. When the movie focuses on her, the sound goes out in the film, you only here complete silence. Which will play a large part in the suspense eventually in the movie. It’s wonderful effect that brings you closer to the character into the situation the daughter is feeling.
After the death, we skip head roughly a year. And we find that Evelyn Abbott is pregnant, which raises a lot of questions of course. Why would you get pregnant during an apocalypse such as this? And how did get pregnant when making noise would kill you? But those question are neither here nor there, she’s pregnant and they must deal with the obvious coming crisis.
The Abbots live on an isolated farm in the middle of the United States, looks like it could be Iowa. Which makes a great place for the monsters that hunt by sound to be.
The movie only follows the Abbots and their dealings with the monsters, but there is a wonderful scene where Lee Abbott lights a signal fire on top a silo on his farm, then fires from other settles slowly light up in the area around him. Which raises the question, what are the people in these other places doing? How are they surviving? I guess having a large group of humans together would make too much noise in order for them to survive.
The movie sets up the inevitable emergency and conflict with the birth of the baby. These scenes are reminiscent of Alien, stalking being searching for its victims, while the victim quietly hides hoping the monster will just move on. The scenes are tense and frightening.
Final Thoughts
I highly recommend A Quiet Place. It is tense and frightening. If you can, see this in the movie theater.