The Box Office:
Paramount/Viacom Inc. will release A Quiet Place this coming Friday following a successful SXSW debut. The grim horror flick, produced by Paramount and Platinum Dunes, has earned strong notices and plaudits for director (and star) John Krasinski. But, as regular readers know, Paramount has been suffering over the last few years as a prime victim of the new “Netflix and Chill” era.
They have released a flurry of studio programmers and prestige flicks, including a few acclaimed horror movies, only to have audiences mostly ignore them in favor of season’s given tentpole. Jennifer Lawrence's Mother! got creamed by It last September while Natalie Portman's Annihilation (which went to Netflix outside of America and China) got steamrolled by Black Panther. It’s not that they don’t release good movies, it’s that there are a lot fewer adults/general moviegoers who go to the movies just to go to the movies.
So, will A Quiet Place be another acclaimed critic’s darling horror flick to play to comparatively empty theaters? We can hope that this is the one that snaps the studio out of its relative two-year slump, just before Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible Fallout presumably gives them their first mega-hit since… Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation back in 2015.
This obviously was not an expensive film, and studio fortunes are not made or lost on the successes of lower-budget horror flicks. But something’s got to give, especially as it’s clearly not the movies that are the problem. And A Quiet Place is a terrific movie.
The Review:
A Quiet Place is a splendid genre exercise, offering a strong high-concept that blends post-apocalyptic survival horror with “things that go bump in the night” terror. It is lean, mean and brutally efficient, existing as both a superb human drama and relentless and physically exhausting nightmare. This is a shockingly powerful and just-plain shocking horror triumph.
After a jolting prologue that immediately establishes the stakes and the rules, we move to what is just over a year after most of humanity was wiped out by would-be monsters who react to even the slightest sound. These creatures are apparently blind, but if they have… excellent hearing. Those who have survived have adjusted to a life lived in near-total silence, where the slightest noise can bring gruesome death.
The picture, penned by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and Krasinski, features almost no verbal dialogue, as our core family of five (with a baby on the way) communicates in ASL. It’s an effective gimmick, one that allows the terrifying emptiness of silence to take center stage. Krasinski, with the help of cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen (Fences, Girl on the Train, etc.), stages an unyielding series of rubber-band set-pieces, with visual clues and implied peril placed just so in anticipation without sacrificing the relative plausibility of its character drama.
That this weary family immediately earns our empathy makes it more than just a hellish funhouse. Krasinksi offers a grim and subtle turn as a day-to-day survivalist while Emily Blunt is faced a looming due date as she tries to make sure that her children do more and know more about the world than mere subsistence-level survival. There’s almost something naively idealistic about teaching your kids long-division in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but it’s as much about feeling human as it is about imparting knowledge.
We plunge headfirst into the nitty-gritty details of this new normal with only hints of how the world became undone. Like the best post-apocalyptic stories, A Quiet Place dances around the idea that day-to-day life becoming so devoid of joy and wrapped up in moment-to-moment peril that it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. There are moments of humanity and warmth, empathy and kindness, especially in the relationship between the (unnamed) father and his daughter (a superb Millicent Simmonds, who is indeed deaf in real life).
I won’t give away the moment-to-moment story beats and plot turns, but the tension is almost continuous from the first frame to the last. A Quiet Place is a classic variation of what Roger Ebert used to call a bruised-forearm movie. The entire second half amounts to one long sequence of escalating peril and ever-changing danger. Considering how many near-misses and close calls this family encounters in just a few days, it’s a little unlikely that they’ve survived for over 400 days, but that’s a minor nitpick.
There are other caveats, like why anyone would have a baby in such an environment, but the film plays its audience like a piano in the moment, leaving questions of external logic for the drive home. This is a remarkably scary and nailbiting-ly intense horror movie, complete with terrific creature effects and a sense that these filmmakers cannot be trusted to play by any rules. It’s unnerving to the nth degree, existing as a working as a subtle empowerment fable that slowly deconstructs its core patriarchal structure.
A Quiet Place is grim as hell and its PG-13 rating is a sick joke, but for those who can take it I’d recommend seeing it on the biggest screen in the most packed-possible auditorium. We’ll see if this is a one-time deal or if John Krasinski will join the likes of Jordan Peele and Mike Flanagan as next-wave “masters of horror.” A Quiet Place is as relentlessly scary a theatrical horror flick as I can remember. Wes Craven would have loved it. You will too.
