A Quiet Place

You know certain ideas and stories are meant to be told only through motion pictures, simply because if it's entirely visual based. Post 2010s, it's extremely hard to find one that embraces this fundamental understanding of a movie - short form for moving images. But worry not, as John Krasinski is here to revive the tradition through his 2018 post-apocalyptic horror thriller A Quiet Place!

In a bleak dead town, silence is the only ally for a family struggling to exist with nowhere else to go in a world that has gone to total shit. We witness the principal characters protected with heavy caution by a husband cum father. They communicate using sign language or murmured words. Powder marked pathway to walk, mute cooking methods, cloth on sink table to absorb water droplets resulting from facewashes, light bulbs for signals, sacks for storage and game board pieces are constituents of their everyday noiseless life. Through the slanted Christ emblem, we know all hope is already lost here. After a robust setup of characters and universe, we see, through a sheer-terrifying toy airplane incident, what lies in the dark and waits for a sound emission to hunt!

The reason A Quiet Place is a brilliant idea to project on film is its sole reliance on visual storytelling. No dialogues, narration or any form of verbal sounds can help you. You only have the moving images for guidance. No expositions were included, could you believe it?! Only the absolute necessary information was smartly sneaked into the narration through writings on whiteboards. We only needed the minimum to completely enjoy this flick: Blind creatures attack based on sound. Those who have survived lived by not making one. No time was wasted explaining the backstory, scientific explanations or other extraneous bullcrap.

Tension, thrill, suspense and conflict arrived in the form of any noise making! Through this one simple notion, John Krasinski has juiced out maximum potential nerve-wrecks, especially with segments featuring Emily Blunt. The sequence where her water broke, foot wringed onto a nail and childbirth in a bath tub while being ransacked by an alien was horror in the purest sense of the word! The same can be said about the scene where she has to save her baby in a flooded underground chamber with the monster submerged in it. New baby cooing, fire lamp shattering, hysterical old man screaming, kids stuck in corn field and falling down into a grain silo were equally nail-biting! You'd feel as if you're placed inside a pressure cooker waiting to burst! Some of the sound diversions like the alarm clock distraction and sound transmitter advantage were seamlessly woven into the plot, although the latter could have used some clarifications on how it actually functioned.

Silence for a long duration can definitely render one restless and uncomfortable, therefore the makers knew, for the most parts, when and where to poke that bubble and let some sound seep in. Listening to song through earphones, pulsating score, amazing sound design and speaking normally at the waterfall background were well done. The jump scares didn’t effectively mean anything though.

Emily Blunt's performance in sign language was really good. Creature designs were executed with care. The dad's death was truly touching, making it an emotionally relevant and downrightly impactful Plot Point II. Him saying "I Love You" to his daughter prior to demise was even more sad and heartbreaking! As the protected became protectors and crucial puzzle to dad's research solved, the remaining family is all the more prepared to use the alien's strength and defeat it in a snappy climax!