'A Quiet Place' Is Very Suspenseful but Falls a Little Short

All I knew about A Quiet Place before going to see it last night was that it was a horror film and making noise meant you were in big trouble. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski don’t waste any time expediting the urgency either, and the weight of the silence heightens the tension from the outset.

On the other hand, a little quiet among the loud disarray of our own lives and the stereophonics of the latest superhero is something to consider in this Krasinski directed film. Set against a bucolic and abandoned New Hampshire like backdrop, the burden of silence seems a welcome tradeoff.

The same goes for having completely just cause to not having kids yapping incessantly on all manner of irrationality (Yes, I work with children). That’s a pretty tall order, and the couple’s five year old son (Cade Woodward) sounds off the inciting incident loud and clear.

So for me, I had no idea what was coming in the 2018 screenplay written by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck. A black hole that rips open the space-time continuum and sucks the auditory away, ghosts or zombies who’ve risen from the dead or some angry aliens who have an aversion to whining.

With plot holes, suspense is intense.

Krasinski knows, and he is no match for the creature that doesn’t quite break the sound barrier but has the boy gone in a blip. Reverberating, the evisceration is pretty intense.

We jump 350 days, and the debilitating pain can only be left unspoken. We also have no idea where these creatures are from. Did they come from outer space or emerge from below? We also don’t know their motivation because they don’t seem to eat their victims.

In defense, you also can’t help wonder why someone didn’t make a real big noise and then cluster bomb their asses en masse.

Nonetheless, society has broken down, but there’s no Walking Dead-like turf wars with inside voice only. The party of four is all alone. A little hard to believe—especially since the quartet has a cornfield full of sustenance.

No one ever stubs their toe or snores either.

Still, it’s a science fiction movie. If you want to enjoy any films of this genre, plot holes are the name of the game.

Like Father like daughter isn’t quite enough.

Otherwise, our family does have a little dysfunction to add to the drama. Circumstances obviously beyond the normal range of outside forces, father and 13-year-old daughter (Millicent Simmonds) have an elevated level of love hate going on. But the dissection of the dynamic comes down to the everyday nonetheless. “You need to say that you love her,” Krasinski’s son (Noah Jupe) offers the obvious.

This falls far short of what we go through in examining Mel Gibson’s family in Signs. There’s also a distinction in the doling out of suspense.

Yes, A Quiet Place does have your inner ear on alert for any sound and certainly hedges you to the edge of your seat in anticipation. The impending birth of Blunt’s baby hangs over ominously as well. But by comparison, less is more.

The aliens are pretty fierce in their appearance and are almost the next step in Alien’s evolution. It certainly titillates, but the brief glimpses we get of our water averse friends in Signs do much more to terrify. On the other hand, they do click maybe in homage of M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece.

Ultimately, the plot unfolds, and while the final cutaway certainly suffices, it’s also a bit empty. Of course, we definitely see that the father does love the daughter, and the manner in which it's revealed is touching. But unlike Signs, there isn’t the in-depth dissertation into the family’s soul, and all you have is another angry, aggressive gaggle of intergalactic travelers rethinking their itinerary.