Review of A Quiet Place (2018) by 43In2014 — 09 Apr 2018

The short review: This is a must-see super tense thriller that has great sound effects and sound editing, and great acting all around. There are a couple of plot holes, but the good parts cover these up.

Related media: There isn't any related book / TV series.

What's it like?: The inspiration for this film could be The Diary of Anne Frank. Other recent similar works including 2015’s Hidden. In this film, the alien hunters are highly perceptive of unnatural sounds (but cannot see well?!). The family of five hides in a farm and go about daily activities very quietly, but a series of events eventually draw the aliens to the farm for a final showdown.

Pros: 1) Sci-fi films need rules on what is feasible and what is not. This film stick to these rules consistently and the film thus works very well.

2) The sound effects and sound editing were done very well here. The sound comes on and goes silent at different times. It also portrays the difficulty deaf people have with their hearing devices. It is very quiet for most of the film and my fellow cinema-goers were actually very careful not to fiddle with their food packaging then, which is quite an achievement for a film. 3) Needless to say, this film is a super-tense thriller. Impending dangers are given time to build up thus making the experience for the viewers very tense. The last film I saw that was similarly tense was 2017’s Get Out and that was excellent too.

4) Emily Blunt's acting is good enough to win an Academy Award. No holocaust film required! Cons: 1) Sight is the most important sense for any species and is required for that species to dominate all others. It is unlikely that an alien species able to build spaceships to come to Earth have such poor eyesight. A caveat of this is that the aliens could merely be creatures dropped off from space by their more sense-able masters. 2) Even if the hunters could not see (well?) it doesn’t make sense for the family to highlight the farm that they live at by turning on all the lights at night and farming their corn in such neat rows. The aliens could have some spaceship or drones with sensors that can see such things.

3) No explanation was provided for why the farm had a steady supply of electricity. Most part of the film takes place more than a year after the aliens appear. Is the National Grid still operational or does the farm have a generator, which would be noisy though? 4) It is not possible to physically upturn a nail in the way shown in the film, but a greater issue here is that the film fails to incorporate this nail into the story, towards the end of the film.

5) Why would the father set up operational microphones and speakers at home when this could accidentally create unwanted sounds?

How would the different age groups rate it?

Children: (This is too tense for children.).

Teens: Excellent.

Young adults: Excellent.

Medium age adults: Excellent.

Old adults: Excellent.

Rating: 5/5 (no half scores). Pay to watch it in the cinema and to buy the DVD.