Review of A Quiet Place (2018) by Kameca S — 22 Apr 2018

Sicario called and wants Emily Blunt and that foreboding trombone down-slide back. It's a good combo, but let's not overdo it. Speaking of the score, one would think that a movie called A Quiet Place would have an appropriately subdued soundtrack, if any at all. Just in case you aren't sure what emotion you're supposed to feel at any given time, please defer to the intrusive and manipulative score. But of course, for his first foray into full-on horror John Krasinsky is allowed a few oversights. After all of the hype we've heard about this thing, I was surprised that the score was only one of several alarming missteps in the film.

In the film's favor, Emily Blunt gives a solid performance, the production design and atmosphere are on point (if not a bit too similar to Trey Edward Shults' It Comes at Night), and contained herein are some genuinely well executed scenes of intense dread. But remember that scene in Alien where the xenomorph gets inches away from Ridley's face? Well, this movie is like if Signs had next to no dialogue and every 20 minutes that scene from Alien happened. It's quiet, there's a jump scare, and the monster shows up. Everyone has to be quiet or distract the monster until it goes away or someone dies.

There have been quite a few comparisons between this and Jordan Peele's Get Out, but where Get Out is a taut socially relevant psychological thriller, this movie looks like what would happen if Jim from The Office directed a horror film. It's perfectly serviceable, pleasantly average, and only remarkable in the sense that it is relatively better than most of the incompetence that it contends with. The fact that it's such a short feature helps since the premise is novel but barely justifies the screen time. As for it being an intelligent film, almost every scene has some sort of nagging fundamental flaw. The world it is set in taxes the limits of incredulity, and frequently this detracts from the suspension of disbelief required to really invest in the characters or the terror.

The movie begins with this family raiding a derelict store for medical supplies. The youngest boy finds a toy rocket ship that, as you know from the trailer, goes off and makes a lot of noise. At that point, civilization had been decimated by aliens that hunt and kill anything that makes noise, so one would think that witnessing first-hand the near complete collapse of society over the course of the last 89 days would impress upon that child the need to keep silent. That's the premise of the movie after all. I won't risk sounding like Cinema Sins by boring you with every example of why the film's internal logic fails, but it severely detracted from the viewing as I'm sure it will for anyone else actively engaged with the film. But props to Krasinksy for trying to grow as an artist.