A Quiet Place film review Chris Hembury

A Quiet Place ****

Real life Couple Emily Blunt and John Korsinski, who also writes and Directs star in the quietest horrors you’ll see all year… A Quiet Place.
In the not so distant future the world has been overrun by monsters that use noise to hunt and kill. In the midst of this nightmarish world a family are trying to survive.

That’s basically the story, there’s no overruling goal or MacGuffin it’s gently paced mature Horror that works harder than most others in the genre to deliver this fresh narrative spin. Not unlike Don’t Breathe where teenagers had to evade a blind killer here it’s a filmmaking experiment of making noise scary and it works.

In a world that any noise could mean your sudden gruesome death you know A Quiet Place

may be a quiet film but that’s trick the silence is almost intermittently erupted into a multitude of jump scares that keep things from getting dull. The jump scare tradition has become a bit of a Hollywood reliance where as here I think the film could have got away without based on the strong script.

The script (which nearly joined the Cloverfield universe apparently in it’s original pitch) was also co written by Krasinski it keeps things tight and has some nice horror moments and a very good third act ties things up. The attention to detail with the monsters is also well done as they are genuinely gruesome and not something you want meet in an ally.

The film starts with a shock which sets the tone making it apparent that anyone could be for monster lunch which keeps tensions high. Potentially the three writers behind this may have social services checking on them after watching the film as the children are really put through the mill from word go from peril to peril. And with Emily Blunt’s Character heavily pregnant a prime target there’s really no end to the danger with the stakes high.

The story focuses on the human survival element entirely with very little on the background of the story in other films it works well but here it almost feels like a loose end aside from the odd newspaper clippings we have don’t get much information on the origins of the downfall of global society which seems incredibly vague. It’s also bewildering to conceive with the might of the world’s military technology that no one could make a good enough attempt to stop these creatures. It actually never ever pops up in conversation (Or should I say Sign language) what happened, how and where the human is heading which with such a high concept back story seems a little unrealistic.

These are little points within a film that ultimately is a great success which brings freshness and originality to the horror genre that should be celebrated and Krasinski has done that here with gentile and precise direction showing his skill behind the camera as well.