2018. PG-13. 90 minutes.
No, this isn’t an article about libraries. Contrary to popular belief, libraries are NOT quiet. Still, my instinctual shushing urges that I honed in library school attracted me to this movie.
I really wanted to like it. It had a great concept: A science fiction/horror world where blind aliens have the ability to track and kill people using sound. Using the absence of sound is a great motif of classic horror movies. We all know that sound in movies can create moods. Who remembers the chi-chi-chi-chi-hah-hah (called Jason stalking music) to signal when Jason Voorhees appears on screen in Friday the 13th or the iconic screaming violins in the shower scene in Psycho? My blood pressure is already rising just thinking about it. Sound, or the absence thereof, can effect an audience positively or negatively. This same concept goes for all the sappy music in romantic comedies. Damn you, Sweet Home Alabama.
Back to A Quiet Place. The movie opens a few months into the disaster with the family scrounging for food and supplies in a local supermarket. Luckily, they know American Sign Language (which is subtitled for us) because one of their daughters is deaf. This gives them an advantage for communication post-alien invasion. The daughter has lost the use of her cochlear implant, so scenes where it is from her POV you have this hissing sound and it is entirely quiet which was a nice touch. The family, despite having a 4 year old, has adjusted well to their new life. They don’t wear shoes because they would be too noisy and even the small shaking of a pill bottle to check for antibiotics turns into a heart-pounding scare. They sand all their regular pathways, paint steps in the house for spotting creaks, and grow their own food. So here’s where it lost me… What about sneezing? Coughing? Farting? If the aliens have such a great sense of hearing that, later in the movie, they can hear the static on the television or a small picture frame dropping from a mile away, surely if anyone had a particular loud bodily function, they would be caught? They tried to make it seem like if there were natural noises it could be covered but the movie fell apart for me there. I mean at one point she’s listening to music on an iPod and we all know that there is a very little bit of music that comes out of the headphones! I mean where is the line?
For a family who seems to have adapted to survival in this soundless world, they made at least one huge mistake. The wife, Evelyn Abbot (Emily Blunt) is pregnant… poor choice there. How do you control a screaming baby? They were going to put it in a small soundproof bed (that looks more like a casket) with a mini oxygen tank. Nine months and that was the best they could come up with. I’m sure there were still plenty of condoms in the apocalypse. I know John Krasinski is hard to resist, but still.
I heard on NPR that there’s less than 10 places devoid of non human sound in the world. According to the podcast, in a forest like that you can hear for miles. Isn’t that the last place you’d want to be during a sound heightened alien invasion? Wouldn’t the city be the best place to go as the sounds would be all mixed into the general cacophony? Am I thinking too hard about this movie?
This movie could have gone in a more interesting direction, and maybe the sequel (slated for 2020) will explore more of this world. There must have been a few surviving families judging by the nightly fires being lit. In the beginning of production, the writers thought about pitching it as part of the Cloverfield Universe, which I would have approved of. Most of those movies were also left open ended with glaring plot holes. Critics seem to disagree with me with a 95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but they never learned the power of a good library shush, did they?
